


Derry Days

by SidleyParkHermit



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Repeated Temporary Character Death, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), Time Loop, even Happy Death Day hadn't come out yet, not sure if it's enough to merit a violence warning or not but I mean it is a russian-doll time loop, quite a few stabbings, tragically there are no Russian Doll references because it wasn't out yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:00:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21857224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SidleyParkHermit/pseuds/SidleyParkHermit
Summary: Everyone starts talking at once, but Richie cuts through the loudest. “Okay, back up, back up. Where are you getting all of this?”“It’s happened before. I keep dying and reliving this day over and over.”Bill is the first to speak, turning to Mike. “Uh, is that…”Mike shakes his head, frowning.“Shit,” Eddie says. “I wasreallyhoping Mike would know something.”
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 81
Kudos: 400





	1. Chapter 1

“Richie. I gotta tell you something.”

“What, what’s up, buddy?” Richie is smiling but it’s the smile he does when he’s afraid, the one that he doesn’t know he’s doing.

“I fucked your mother.”

Richie doesn’t say anything back, which makes Eddie start getting scared again. Richie’s supposed to give him something back and it’ll keep being okay, it’ll be okay because they’re still them. Instead Richie is just looking at him, from his face to the giant wound that Richie’s so quixotically trying to dam up, and back to his face again. 

Eddie gets his free hand onto Richie’s shoulder. It feels almost too heavy to lift. He wants to try to tell Richie it’s okay.

They can hear the others trying to fight Pennywise, and it doesn’t sound good. “You should go help them, Richie,” he says. 

“I’m not leaving you,” Richie says. 

In his peripheral vision Eddie sees his own hand fall back down, coming to rest on Richie’s leg, and he can’t move it again.

He tries to say more words. He thinks he only manages to think them. _I’m the one who’s leaving you. God I don’t want to, but I am. I don’t want to go. Please don’t let this be the end. Let me stay, I don’t want to leave, I want to go back—_

He sees Richie’s face close to his and hears him saying his name, and then the sound is gone and his vision whites out.

/ / / /

He’s aware of pre-dawn light through his eyelids and his phone alarm vibrating on the side table, music fading up in volume. 

_Gee, but it’s great to be back home_

_Home is where I want to be!_

_I’ve been on the road so long, my friend…_

Same song as he had on his alarm yesterday.

Yesterday? Today?

What just— happened? 

What the FUCK just happened? 

Where is he? Was that a _dream_? Or is _this_ the dream. Or is the whole thing — is Pennywise doing this — is he in the deadlights? — or is he just dead? Because he did… die. 

Didn’t he die?

He squeezes his eyes shut, opens them again, the hotel room’s still there, he can’t fucking take this, he grabs his phone to see what the hell day it is. 

It’s yesterday. That is, it’s today. 

Two days ago, Mike called them all, and Stanley Uris died; last night he saw his friends and remembered the stolen years of their lives; some six or seven hours ago Mike told them all, “It’s better if I show you,” and said he’d be back at dawn; and none of the rest of it has happened yet, all that’s happened is that he’s slept, according to all the physical evidence, according to everything except his own very clear and certain mind.

He holds the phone white-knuckled, lies on his back, and stares at the ceiling for a while. Okay. Whatever this is, he needs to think very carefully before doing anything.

Several minutes go by. Nothing seems to _happen_ , besides the song of an early bird outside and the light in his window brightening from nautical twilight toward sunrise. That, in itself, counts as evidence against the possibility that Pennywise is doing something to him. If the clown’s running this show, that little chickadee ought to be flying in the window and pulling out Eddie’s entrails by now.

Slowly, and quietly, he gets out of bed. All his stuff is where it should be, if it’s yesterday. He gets dressed. Yesterday — today — he was the first one downstairs, but he’s spent longer in his room this time, so he doesn’t know if he still will be.

He also doesn’t know if, when he opens the door, he’s going to find the rest of the Derry Townhouse where he’s expecting it to be, or if he’s going to open his door into the decaying front room of 29 Neibolt Street and a bunch of little kids in futuristic clothes will be there and start screaming in horror at whatever he’s become. So that’s part of why he’s procrastinating.

He opens the door. It’s the Townhouse. The same gentle intimations of daylight are coming through the stained-glass windows by the stairs. He smells the hotel’s strong, cheap coffee. From the walkway, he can see Mike and Beverly sitting at a table downstairs. There’s no blood seeping from the walls. No strange new guy behind the bar saying _You’ve always been here, Mr. Kaspbrak._

“Hey,” Beverly says to him as he walks down to the lobby. Neither she nor Mike reacts to him as if he’d been dying of Pennywise impalement when they saw him last. Nor do any of the others, when they come severally down to join them. 

Before he got downstairs, he was thinking about how to subtly feel out whether the others had the same thing happen — he figured they might want to play the cards close to the chest for the same reasons he would — but actually there’s a pretty good built-in litmus test there already, isn’t there. If _he’d_ been the one to watch _Richie_ die just minutes ago — he doesn’t want to imagine it, but if he had — he wouldn’t be able to play it cool right now for anything in the world. He’d be banging on Richie’s door and clinging tight to his confused friend as soon as he saw him alive, just like every awkward time-traveler on TV.

Either they don’t know or they’re not them — and the second option seems more impossible than anything else as he looks at them all, listens to them each talk. These are the Losers. Who could fake them?

They walk out to the Barrens. Eddie stays pretty quiet through the whole thing at the clubhouse, but if anyone thinks he’s acting weird, they don’t say so. After all, if ever there was a day to act weird, this would be it.

The thing is, he’s going to have to tell them what he knows, right? If they just proceed as planned, this will end in disaster again; his death and maybe everyone’s. But talking about it will also tip his hand to whoever or whatever might be observing them. So he has to be careful. He wants to try to gather as much information as he can about everything before taking this situation to the others. 

What doesn’t he know? Besides the obvious, i.e. how to fucking kill Pennywise. If that’s even possible. 

He doesn’t know a lot of the shit Mike knows, since Mike’s been here compiling the Pennywise dossier and it’s not like there was time for him to explain 25 years of research. Mike probably knows things that he doesn’t even realize he knows — things that can help them make a better plan.

He doesn’t know what Richie did today. Richie brought an arcade token to the ritual and he didn’t say a word about why — and earlier in the afternoon he tried to fucking _leave._ Alone.

Okay. Sticking with Richie seems like a good place to start.

“Hey Richie,” he says when he can catch him away from the others for a moment. “Fuck what Mike said, we should stick together.”

Richie shakes his head. “I thought about it, man, and… I actually think Mike’s right. I think we have to face the gazebo alone. I do, anyway.”

“The what?” Eddie says, confusion and a shock of anxiety colliding.

“What? —Oh, it’s this incredibly stupid fuckin’… internet story from someone’s D&D game. There’s a gazebo on a hill, the players don’t know what the word ‘gazebo’ means and they think it’s a new monster, they’re all ‘I fire all my arrows at it’ and the DM is like ‘your arrows don’t do anything, it’s a gazebo’—“

“You’re a fucking nerd, Rich,” Eddie says, incredibly relieved that this is about something lame and normal. “You know what, you’re the _worst_ kind of nerd, ‘cause you’re the kind that pretends you’re not a nerd.” 

“God, you’re still so cute when you’re angry,” Richie says, reaching out to pinch his cheek. Eddie swats his hand away, but hangs on to his wrist.

“Just fucking… after you find your artifact? Give me a call before you do anything else. Okay?”

“…Why?”

“Why? Because I said so. Because I was your _best_ friend, and we almost died in a sewer together, and I’m asking you to do one simple goddamn thing. Can you do that?”

Richie looks at him very strangely. Which, presumably, Eddie will understand better after Richie _tells him what happened at the goddamn arcade_.

“Okay. I’ll try.”

“Don’t try, just do it.”

“O _kay_ , Master Yoda.” 

And then everyone’s gone their separate ways, and Eddie’s alone. He wonders if he should have just told everyone back in the clubhouse.

The other thing is. Okay, fine.

If none of this is real — he doesn’t want to break the spell any sooner than he has to. Whether it’s a torment from Pennywise or a mercy from his own dying brain, it’s allowed him to come back here. His last day with his friends. If the truth means that it’s time to leave them—? He’s not ready. 

Maybe that means he’s not strong. He doesn’t know. 

He stands in the sun by himself for a minute, then he goes to the pharmacy.

At the pharmacy, Keene pinches his mole again. (God, it’s so fucking nasty. Everything is so nasty and disgusting here.) He goes downstairs and gets jumped by the leper again. It seems like the leper is just as fully reset as the humans in town — if It had any awareness that all this has happened before, wouldn’t this be going differently somehow?

The leper succumbs, covers him in puke, and disappears. If there had been any doubt in Eddie’s mind that all of this was really happening, the smell and the consistency and the, jesus christ, the taste of this particular low point are all pretty fucking irrefutable. He coughs and spits, retching.

A memory resurfaces, from when he was dying last night (tonight). There was something they were all saying about this fight. He told them the leper felt small? — that was it, they were going to try to get Spider-Clown Pennywise through a narrow space so they could take him down.

Did it work? He doesn’t know, he fucking died. But it’s something. 

He does remember to push on the door. As he passes Greta, she pops her gum, and once again doesn’t remark on the fact that he just ran up from their basement looking like a seagull in an oil spill. He wonders if she doesn’t see it or just doesn’t care. 

Greta was a Derry kid once, now she’s a Derry adult — what does she see? Should he maybe try to talk to Greta if he keeps Groundhog-Daying his way through here? No, that’s dumb, she’s not a video game NPC—

A blaring car horn cuts off that line of thought as he nearly walks into traffic. “Fucking _right-of-way_ ,” he says to the driver, who flips him off.

Once he’s across the street, he checks his phone and realizes he got a text from Richie while he was otherwise occupied in the basement.

_Got my thing. I’m okay. I just need to walk it off for a while. See you soon._

Okay, well — that’s something too. 

Eddie steps onto the porch, back at the hotel, and feels a lurch of fear in his stomach as he remembers that, oh, yeah: Bowers is in his room.

He runs through a lot of scenarios very quickly in his head. He could just not go to his room, but that would leave Bowers free to wander off and attack more people. Last night Bowers got to Mike and almost killed him, _after_ being stabbed in the chest. So that’s out. 

He could tell Bev and Ben, who are sitting on the stairs right now if everything’s the same, but that’s going to put the two of them in danger. He can get the cops involved, which might take care of Bowers, but could also eat up like the entire day, and Pennywise is going to kill at least one more person before tonight if what Bill said he saw was real —

shit, he _forgot_ until _just now_ about the little kid that Bill saw getting killed today! that was why they all had to go to the house before they were ready! was what Bill saw real, or was it another Pennywise trick? he has no fucking idea —

Okay, he’s just going to go up and get the drop on Bowers himself. The reason Bowers got him before was the element of surprise. He’ll take Bowers out and he’ll get the fuck on with the day.

“Oh my god, what happened to you?” Bev says as he goes up the stairs.

“The usual, it’s fine,” he says, making sure not to get any monster puke on Ben or Bev as he goes by, so that neither of them will have a reason to head upstairs themselves.

He unlocks his room very quietly. He goes up to the bathroom door slowly and listens for movement. Then he slams it open and says “Surprise, motherfucker!” and tackles all five foot nine, 140 pounds of his body onto Bowers, who looks mildly surprised, just like he did when Eddie stabbed him in the chest yesterday. 

He knocks Bowers to the ground, the switchblade cutting a defensive wound into Eddie’s arm as they go down. Bowers’s head conks against the tub, and it doesn’t stop him, but it’s at least gotta slow him down a little. Eddie’s still got the upper hand, he just needs to keep hitting and hitting.

Bowers fights way differently when he thinks he might lose. 

Eddie grapples for the knife with both hands, and Bowers basically punches his face in, he can’t even see for a second, and he feels a knee come down and crunch his ribs, and everything really, really hurts, and then the knife is in his throat, and he can sort of see as Bowers leaves him on the tile floor and walks out toward the stairs, and he can faintly hear Beverly downstairs screaming as she sees Bowers covered in his blood.

/ / / /

_Gee, but it’s great to be back home…_

He opens his eyes, and closes them again, and lies in bed for a while, waiting for his breath to even out, feeling the pulse in his throat with the tips of his index and middle fingers.

So… this is a repeating thing. That first… yesterday… it was more of a mystery, but now this can officially be considered a loop. A loop that, as far as he can tell, goes around when he does. _Da capo al fine._

It occurs to him that he should look at Twitter or something, check on the outside world, to make sure it’s not just Derry in some kind of time bubble. He opens Twitter. He determines that it’s the same day everywhere else as it is here. Then he deletes Twitter, because jesus.

He tries to go through the day as closely to the first time as possible, including the part where Bowers gets the drop on him and stabs him in the face before Eddie stabs him back. 

Great, he got through that part alive. Good job, Eds. 

Now he has to fix the rest of the day going on from here, starting with the kid at the festival. If that really did happen.

It does happen. 

Bill goes from there to the house and they do the whole horrible thing again. 

Eddie resolves to stick with Richie and not get separated, because it was his fault Richie got caught in the deadlights the first time, it only happened because Eddie dropped his flashlight and let him run ahead alone. He’s quick to save Richie from the Stan-crab monster. Down in the cistern he picks Regular Scary, which turns out to be the goddamn severed legs storage room again. 

“Next time we just skip the Monty Hall problem from Hell,” Eddie says as they run back down the corridor. 

“ _Next_ time?” Richie says. “And how could you not go with _Monty Hell_ , it’s right there!”

Eddie tries to use every advantage of his memory, and as they’re trying to figure out if there’s any logic to the caverns down here, any consistency they could use against It—

It kills Richie with a swipe of a claw so fast there’s no chance to say any last words this time. He’s just gone. 

Eddie climbs into Its mouth with the imagination spear and stabs It as It bites down on him with its infinite teeth.

/ / / /

_Gee, but it’s great…_

Eddie manages not to pound on the door to Richie’s hotel room and do the awkward time traveler thing, but it’s not easy. 

He makes himself go straight downstairs and drink cheap coffee and eat two of the protein bars he brought from home. He checks his watch a lot, down in the lobby with the others; Richie’s always the last one to get up. He can’t help giving Richie what’s probably too big of a smile when he does arrive on schedule. It’s all Eddie can do to not run up and hold him tight. Instead, he pushes his chair out and addresses the group. 

“I gotta talk to everyone before we go to the clubhouse.” Mike looks _very_ startled.

“Oh shit, the clubhouse!” Bev says with delight. “I remember now.” She beams at Ben, who smiles and looks down at his shoes.

“I didn’t tell you we were going there,” Mike says, looking him over carefully.

“I know. This is gonna take a minute.” Eddie sighs. “Number one, because I keep — getting off track, and you’re gonna have a lot of questions, _first_ of all, we have to help Dean.”

“Who’s Dean?” Bill says.

“The kid, that little kid that Richie traumatized at the restaurant last night? He lives in your old house. Pennywise is planning to kill him around sunset at the festival.”

Everyone starts talking at once, but Richie cuts through the loudest. “Okay, back up, back up. Where are you getting all of this?”

“It’s happened before. I keep dying and reliving this day over and over.”

Bill is the first to speak, turning to Mike. “Uh, is that…”

Mike shakes his head, frowning. 

“Shit,” Eddie says. “I was _really_ hoping Mike would know something.”

“Not ringing any bells.”

“‘Kay. Mike is gonna take us all to the clubhouse and explain what we need for the ritual,” Eddie begins, and summarizes as best he understood it all. There’s still some skepticism on everyone’s faces, he can’t exactly blame them for that, given that they’re dealing with something that can make itself look like anybody.

“Ben, you already have your artifact, it’s the page Beverly signed in your yearbook and it’s in your wallet right now.” 

Ben wordlessly takes out his wallet and produces the 27-year-old sheet of paper. 

“Bev, yours was, like, a folded-up postcard, that’s all I know.” Bev looks at Bill and Ben looks at Bev. He hopes helping those three sort out their shit isn’t going to be part of his job fixing the timeline. 

“Mike had a rock from that rock fight with the Bowers gang. I didn’t totally understand that because we were all there for the rock fight, but that’s what you had. I guess it makes sense though because you already remembered everything? Richie’s token is an actual arcade token from the Capitol Theater, didn’t get any context for that either — and uh, mine was my inhaler, which I guess is self-explanatory.” 

Richie takes his glasses off and rubs at his face. He looks startled but mostly just sad.

“Bill — yours is the boat you made with Georgie.” 

Bill goes white, and seems almost mad at Eddie. “I d-don’t f-f-f-fu… I d-d-d-d… Fuck, Eddie, are you sure?”

“I’m sorry, man. That’s what you said. So I guess you’re gonna find that somewhere.”

“Jesus,” Bill says. He takes a couple steps away.

“So how do you end up back here?” Mike says.

Eddie takes another deep breath, and gives as coherent a recap of the original day as he can — his pharmacy encounter, the return of Henry Bowers, Richie and Bill each running off on their own, the return of Henry Bowers part two: the death of Henry Bowers, the kid, the house, the ritual, the clown-spider, and a _very_ quick summary of how Eddie bit the big one — followed by how little useful information he’s learned in the cycles since then, other than that he shouldn’t try to fistfight Bowers. Everyone’s very quiet.

“All right. First things fuckin’ last,” Richie says, with a pretty good Chris Penn impression. “We’re all on the same page? This is the real Eddie, we believe him, and the things he says happened really did happen?”

“I mean yeah,” Ben says.

“Definitely,” Bill says, very grim.

“I’m so sorry this is happening, Eddie,” Beverly says. “We’re gonna figure it out together.”

There’s a little pause before Mike says, “—oh, yeah, I didn’t even think that was in question. This is just fucking me up, ‘cause I’ve been studying all the horrible phenomena in this town for, like, my whole life, and I have no idea what‘s going on.”

“Also, the part where the ritual doesn’t do what it was supposed to do is pretty upsetting,” Bill says.

Mike rubs his forehead. “Yeah.”

“Eddie,” Beverly says, “do you think It knows the day is repeating?”

“No. I mean, It doesn’t _act_ like it knows, and this is the fourth time today has happened for me.”

“Yeah,” Bill says. “It’s not a s-subtle creature.”

“Okay.” Mike still looks queasy, but he’s rallying. “We’ll want to, uh, try to gather as much information as we can. About the day, where all the players are, what we have and haven’t tried. Fill in the blanks we know about, it’ll help us find the ones we don’t.”

“Hey, so, real quick?” Richie actually raises his hand, “I don’t know what would have happened to make me just fully bail on all of you the first day — besides that I’m me—”

“It’s okay, Rich,” Eddie says. “You had a moment. Maybe it wasn’t one thing. I had a moment too. We’re not _monster hunters_ , we’re just a bunch of assholes that had something terrible happen to us and we’re doing our best.”

“Well...” Richie rubs the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable at the whole concept of someone trying to reassure him. “Mike counts as a monster hunter, right? He’s put in the hours. I was gonna say though, I know why I would bring — what I brought. I can’t imagine it having _any_ impact on anyone’s survival odds, but this is no time to fuck around? so like—” Richie closes his eyes for a second and does that grin he does when he’s scared, and he says the next part really fast. 

“So I was at the arcade one time that summer, and I let myself actually like a boy for like, ten seconds without feeling bad about it, and obviously the consequences were _immediate_ and _very_ dramatic, involving both Bowers _and_ Pennywise, _and_ —” Richie suddenly cracks up laughing, bending forward. 

“The fucking— oh my god. Sorry. The fucking Paul Bunyan? The giant plastic slab of American masculinity on a literal pedestal in the middle of our town? Came to life and tried to kill me,” he mimes huge, Pennywise-esque jaws opening up.

“Oh, Richie, honey,” Bev says softly.

“Come on, you don’t think that’s funny? I think it’s hysterical,” Richie says, hands shoved back into his jacket pockets, all scared giggles, shaking slightly.

“No, that’s just really messed up,” Mike says.

“You know what, if I’d been there,” Eddie says, not even sure how to finish that sentence but there’s a protective knot in his stomach compelling him to say _something._

“You’d have what? Gotten your other arm broken?” Richie suggests, but his voice is warm.

“Probably. It would’ve been worth it.”

“Well, y’know. You would’ve had a really hard time getting down the well if you did that, so,” Richie says, quietly for him, looking at his shoes. There’s a hint of a smile that isn’t his scared one.

“Hey, good news is, we’re gonna kill that fuckin’ clown tonight,” Ben says. Richie looks up and catches Eddie’s eye, just to make the most scandalized face imaginable at the discovery that Ben is allowed to say _fuck_. 

“Right,” Bill adds. “First order of business, like Eddie said, the l-little kid from the restaurant needs our help. So. How do we—“ 

He pauses, and the pause stretches out as they all try to think about the same thing. 

“Yeah, I’m trying to think of a better way to say ‘how do we get this eight-year-old boy to trust six adult strangers’,” Eddie says, rubbing his temple. 

“We can do this,” Bev says. “I’ve got an idea. Richie, he said he was a fan of yours. We print off some release forms, tell his parents we’re filming something — make sure his parents are present with him at absolutely every moment, because Pennywise doesn’t take kids when they’ve got their parents’ eyes on them—”

“—You’re right, he doesn’t,” Eddie says, thinking back. They were kids then, he hasn’t thought about it from an adult’s perspective, but— “Do you think he can’t?”

“Like if Mr. Snuffleupagus was a serial killer.”

“He’s strongest in the dark,” Mike nods, ignoring Richie, “and in places that are hidden.”

“You said he got the kid at the festival,” Bill says.

“ _Inside_ the hall of mirrors,” Eddie says. “A concealed, isolated place in the middle of the festival, with the crowds just on the other side of the wall.”

“So let’s say we succeed with Operation: Save the Restaurant Kid,” Richie says. “Which I agree is very important. What’s our step two? You know, the part where we, too, don’t get murdered by Pennywise tonight?”

“I _get_ it, Richie,” Mike says sharply, and then presses his hand over his mouth and shuts his eyes for a couple seconds. “Sorry. I didn’t— sorry.” He looks like he might actually start crying. “I don’t fucking know, Rich. I put everything into this. I — I believe in all of you so much, and I was _right_ to believe in you. I just didn’t imagine it could still…” He puts his head in his hands. “I was here alone all these years. I didn’t think anyone but me could figure it out. I should have trusted you.”

Bill just puts his arm around Mike’s shoulders. “You’re not alone now,” he says.

The kid from the restaurant is harder to track down than they expected. 

They end up finding him at the festival, just as he disappears into the hall of mirrors. They all barrel into the hall of mirrors sticking close together, and are all immediately separated into the shifting, swimming, physically impossible maze. 

“Not real,” Eddie tries to say to himself, terror crawling under his skin. “We’re all right here. It’s not r—”

The walls are closing in on all sides, _he **forgot** an entire living child, what kind of person does that, he got Richie killed, he got himself killed, he can’t help, he’s weak and he’s not smart enough he can’t **help**_ , and at the peak of his fear he looks up and sees Pennywise clinging to the ceiling, and he tries to believe really hard that there’s an open wall in this shrinking glass box, and Pennywise is on him and bites his head off.

/ / / /

Eddie wakes up having a full-blown panic attack. 

He tries to find his inhaler, because he read some interesting things recently about placebo effects that are equally effective when you know it’s a placebo. He remembers he doesn’t have his inhaler. 

He counts five things he can see, four things he can hear — his phone alarm playing Simon and Garfunkel again, that bird outside, there’s not much else he can hear in his room, his inhaler makes a noise when he uses it — three things he can… 

Is it three things you can touch? What are you supposed to do about the smell and taste ones? Stick your tongue on things until your brain stops screaming about how you’re going to die? Maybe it’s just sight, sound, and touch? Maybe that’s it. Five things he can see…

When his vital signs are back to kind of normal, he goes over to Richie’s room. He’s not sure why, except he always turned to Richie when he was afraid, and it’s not like that’s going to change because he knows Richie is gay or whatever.

Richie answers his knock after a few moments. “What’s up, Spaghettio?”

“Lemme sit down in here for a minute,” Eddie says as he walks in.

“Yeah, sure thing,” Richie says to his back. “Personal space is a social construct.”

Eddie sits in the desk chair by the window. He forgot to close the door, and Richie swings it most of the way closed, like he doesn’t know if it would be weird to shut it all the way.

“I think I had a panic attack in my sleep.”

“Oh, big mood. I only slept at all ‘cause I got so fucking hammered.”

“Can you like stop talking for a minute?” He wishes Richie would sit the fuck down.

“‘Hey, good morning, Richie, old buddy. I had a panic attack, so I’ve come to your room at five in the morning to complain about your whole personality.’ ‘Oh cool, that tracks. Hashtag self care.’”

“It’s closer to five-thirty.” Eddie looks down. “Where else was I gonna go?”

“Jesus, I dunno, Ben? Remember how he’s crazy jacked now? Maybe our only hope for actually fighting a monster? Well, and Mike who’s Indiana Jones, but he’s back at his place.”

“I don’t need anything… punched.”

“Besides your V-card, am I right? Up top.” Richie puts up his hand such a perfunctory distance that it would barely qualify as a middle-five.

“Hilarious.”

“Don’t leave me hangin’, Eds.”

“Don’t blame me, you had all of high school to say something.” There’s a pause, Richie staring at him. “Get it, if you wanted to… be the one to…”

“No, I got it. I forgot you were funny.”

“Fuck you.”

Richie sits on the bed, finally. “Do you want a glass of water or something?”

“Yes. Please.”

Richie gets back up and takes the plastic wrap off one of the hotel glasses and gets Eddie some water. Eddie drinks the whole glass slowly before speaking again.

“I know everything that’s gonna happen today. More or less.”

“Wait— you _and_ Bev have psychic powers? Mike and Bill went on a vision quest — am I the Zeppo?”

“I don’t have psychic powers. Maybe you do, though, you’re the one that got caught in the deadlights.”

“I’m gonna do _what?”_ Richie sits heavily back down. “Fuuuck.”

“I don’t know if you _will,_ but…” Eddie sighs. “I think it’ll be easiest if I try to explain it to everyone at the clubhouse.”

“Oh shit,” Richie says, his jaw dropping. “The fucking clubhouse!” Richie’s face looks so suddenly open and happy as the wave of memories washes over him, and it’s such a relief to see him looking like that. He looks into the middle distance, seeming to remember a lot, and he gives Eddie a pensive, lopsided smile, and Eddie wishes he knew what he was thinking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is basically finished, with some revisions still to do in the later segments! Our adventure will continue in... okay, I'm not totally set on the posting schedule because it's the holidays and things get kinda crazy, but pretty soon.
> 
> Eddie's anxiety cool-down technique (attempt to do the five senses countdown, forget how it goes, get distracted and start over) is identical to mine.


	2. Chapter 2

“Yeah,” Eddie says, returning the smile. “It’s still there. We gotta go to the clubhouse, and then…” He rubs at his temple. “Yeah, there’s a lot,“ he trails off, knowing he should wait until they have everyone together, but at the same time wanting to talk to Richie about everything now, if he could get his thoughts in order enough.

“Yeah, no worries, you don’t have to explain it all twice. Tee-bee-eff I wouldn’t mind getting the weird shit in a little more gradual doses today.” Richie’s still wiping the sleep from his eyes. He’s wearing boxer shorts and an old _Swamp Thing_ t-shirt, barefoot in the hotel room like some kind of animal. “Just gimme the spoilers for me personally,” he goes on, because it’s Richie. “Was I really badass? You remember what a badass I was in ’89, right?” He mimes swinging the baseball bat, making a much more satisfying cracking noise than Eddie remembers it actually sounding like when they beat on Pennywise. “Do I say anything cool?”

“Nothing’s for certain, Richie.”

“Yeah, but I wanna know. Did you learn all of everyone’s terrible secrets?”

“Nobody had any terrible secrets,” Eddie says. “Our only terrible secret is the fucking alien clown monster.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Eddie rolls his eyes. It felt weird to say anything about this because it’s Richie’s personal business, but now it feels weirder not to. “I mean, you came out to everybody, that’s not a terrible secret.”

Richie stares bug-eyed at him. “Wow. Okay. So shit really does get dire,” he says, flopping down on his back on the bed, his feet still on the floor. “Was I _actively_ dying when this happened?”

“That’s not funny. And no.”

“I mean, ‘cause I don’t know if you’ve seen my stand-up, but I set up shop a _long_ way into fucking Narnia.”

“I have seen your stand-up. Actually no, I’ve never seen your stand-up, but I’ve seen _somebody’s_ stand-up that you happened to be delivering—”

“You know that shit is rampant, right? Sorry to be the one to tell you.”

“I would love to see _your_ stand-up, though, because that other guy sucks. —Oh,” Eddie goes on aloud as he suddenly realizes, “it’s a _closet_.”

Richie props himself up on one elbow. “What?”

Eddie sighs. “When we opened the Very Scary door in the Neibolt house, there was this storage room back there? But it’s not a storage room, it’s a fucking…closet.” God, he’s so tired of that fucking clown and all his stupid bullshit. If he has to go to the scary doors again tonight, he’s going to be so pissed.

Richie rubs his face, grimacing. “Great. Cool. That’s how fucked up I am. Cool.”

“What do you mean _you're_ fucked up?”

“That’s the worst thing he could find in my subconscious? Is that the worst fear a person could have? I don’t… I don’t think that.” Richie sits back up and takes his glasses off, screwing up his face. “You know I don’t think that, right? I— I don’t have anything to be ashamed of.” He sniffles hard, suddenly looking so young. “I _know_ that and I would never tell anyone _else_ that they shouldn’t— that there was any reason to—”

Richie covers his eyes. He looks exhausted and it seems like he might be for-real starting to cry.

“It’s okay. You’re right. There’s nothing wrong with you.” Eddie feels lost. He wants desperately to say the right thing. “And there was nothing wrong with you back then, either.”

Richie takes a long breath. “Hah. Yeah. That’s the thing, right.” He wipes at his eyes and looks at the floor. “I know all these things thirteen-year-old me doesn’t know. But thirteen-year-old me hasn’t gone anywhere. Don’t tell Bill I was crying,” he adds with almost no pause, putting his glasses back on, and Eddie can’t help laughing out loud. Richie pretends to glare at him, because Eddie was so mean as to laugh at him for being funny.

“I can’t believe you sprang that on me,” Richie says. “I didn’t even get to have pants on. What the fuck, Eds.” Eddie has to cover his mouth, still giggling. “All right. Hey, what about you, man, are you feeling better?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Eddie says, finding that it’s true. He’d almost forgotten the full-body terror that brought him to Richie’s door in the first place. He’s sure it’ll be back soon enough.

“Cool. Let’s all go to the clubhouse, and have ourselves some snacks. …Are there snacks at the clubhouse?”

“No, Richie, there are no snacks at the clubhouse,” Eddie says.

“I guess they would be kind of gross by now.”

“Get dressed, Richie,” Eddie says as he heads out of Richie’s room and back to his own.

“Make me,” Richie calls after him, which doesn’t even make any sense.

  
  


Eddie explains it all at the clubhouse. Mike kind of loses his shit again.

“It _wants_ us to all to get there alive and do the ritual together, so It can consume us there—” Mike presses his hands over his face. “Fuckin’—”

“Okay,” Bev says, “okay. So we know that, that means we can use it. We at least know we all get through the day.”

Eddie shakes his head. “It has _some_ amount of strategy, but there’s no guarantee It won’t try to kill us before then. I learned that last time around. Like, I know It’s got that whole 27 years thing, but that’s not because It’s _patient_ , It’s just sleepy.”

“And there’s Bowers,” Richie says.

“Right. He’s out there looking for us, with guidance from It, and he doesn’t really give a shit about the future, he just likes stabbing people. Especially us.”

They end up splitting into smaller groups to try to cover the bases. Eddie and Richie can pick up their tokens pretty fast without needing to encounter Pennywise, and Mike lets the two of them set up camp in the library and look at a bunch of his weird journals for clues.

It’s a pretty big gesture of trust, because there’s a lot of personal shit in those notebooks. The hope, of course, is that they’ll make some kind of brilliant connections, but the unspoken main purpose is to let Eddie accumulate as much information as he can for next loop in case they fail again tonight.

So Eddie’s sitting in the library with Richie, around the time that Bowers is supposed to be in his room, when he feels a little tingle on the back of his neck and looks up and fucking Bowers is _standing behind them_ , and he and Richie dive for the floor in opposite directions. Bowers laughs, gripping his knife, as they both scramble to their feet.

“You little faggots think you’re pretty fuckin’ smart,” Bowers says, confusingly. “You’ll see. Oh, you’ll see. _He’ll_ show you.”

The old display case, with its conveniently-placed axe, is on the other side of Bowers from them. But they don’t need to arm themselves, they can — and should — just outrun him. Eddie looks to Richie and tries to wordlessly communicate that strategy, and as he does, Bowers makes a little hop and stabbing motion toward Eddie—

Richie jumps on Bowers and fights him even though Eddie _told him_ , he fucking _told him_ how the loops work and why that means Eddie should be the first one into danger—

Richie’s tall and broad-shouldered and extremely motivated, but he’s not actually good at fighting, and Eddie’s trying to get at the axe from the display case when Richie hits the floor with blood going everywhere, and while Eddie is holding Richie and trying to save his life Bowers runs away.

Richie doesn’t make it. It’s kind of a blur after that.

Somehow he gets himself to Neibolt. He has no plan at all. Whatever part of him knows good ideas from bad ideas, it’s no match for the animal instinct propelling him into that hell-house. He’ll kill It or he’ll die, or both, both would be ideal.

Doors slam themselves around him. Oily, sticky smoke comes up from the floorboards. There’s a mirror above a fireplace and in its swimmy surface he sees Pennywise grinning over his shoulder. He turns around and he’s alone in the room; then he feels a tap on his shoulder and looks back to see Pennywise, oversize and insect-like, crawling out of the mirror. Those awful jaws drop open and he’s in the deadlights.

Eddie never got caught in the deadlights before.

He read a sci-fi story once where there was faster-than-light travel with one small catch: your mind could only survive if you stayed unconscious for it. “It’s eternity in there,” said one of the test subjects, or what was left of him, after having a gander.

He doesn’t exactly think of that story right now; it’s very difficult to think of anything. A fragment of it bubbles up in the well of his mind, though, as he tries to hang on to words, to stay steady in his knowledge of who he is and the pieces that make up his life.

Strangely he _feels_ It there with him — no one said that happened — there’s a roar of alien emotion that feels like It’s _raging,_ in all their encounters It never seemed angry—

And he almost thinks he can find something or someone else there too — some sub-audible sound—?

Bev and Richie had this happen and they survived. But that’s actually the problem. If he stays alive for long enough —

It’s trying to _keep_ him alive, It _knows_ — that was what Bowers meant —

But the other kids, the dead kids, were floating too. And _something_ was about to happen to Richie when he was floating the first night. He was gonna die up there, for sure. Could Eddie make it happen? If he’s _trying_ to speed it up, instead of trying to live? Could he catch the deadlights?

( _Can_ he? He hasn’t had to just… die before. He sure doesn’t want to.)

There was a force he could feel, each time they did the ritual, when they drew the deadlights down. He reaches out for that force now, finding it like a fishing line between the deadlights and his suspended body, and he yanks the spinning lights straight into his face. He’ll never be able to describe what happens next, but it definitely leaves him dead.

  
  


/ / / /

_Gee, but it’s great to be back home_

_Home is where I want to be_

Eddie stays in bed for a while.

He doesn’t say a word to anyone about the loop this time. He’s probably more touchy-feely than usual with Richie, but not blow-your-time-traveler-cover levels of touchy-feely. He thinks.

As soon as they split up at the clubhouse, he goes off by himself and buys a gun so he can take out Bowers.

He can’t _believe_ how fast you can buy a fucking gun in Maine.

When he gets to Bowers at the Townhouse, he finds out how much more difficult it is, psychologically, to fire a bullet on purpose into a human being than he thought it was going to be. Even when the human is Bowers.

 _Sorry,_ he thinks to everyone — but mostly to Richie — as Bowers fights him for the gun and he realizes he’s going to lose.

  
  


/ / / /

  
  


_Gee, but it’s great to be back home_

_Home is where I want to be_

_I’ve been on the road so long, my friend_

_And if you came along I know you couldn’t disagree_

_It’s the same old story, yeah…_

At least that time he didn’t have to watch Richie die, though.

Okay. The only time he knows for sure that Pennywise found out about the loops was when they talked about it after getting to the clubhouse. And Pennywise _really_ flipped his shit that time, so that probably was the only time he’s found out. So if they talk about it first thing in the morning at the hotel it should be okay.

If only he could take notes. He looks at his body, reset every time, no opportunity to _Memento_ himself or anything.

He ends up staring at his left hand like he’s never seen it before. It occurs to him that he’s _died_ six times since he last actually thought about Myra.

Sometimes it feels like Eddie has an internal compass, a sense of direction that he’s spent most of his adult life studiously ignoring, but it’s always there nonetheless. Something in him seems to know the way.

It’s that inner wayfinder that he hears now and chooses to listen to as he sets his wedding ring down on the nightstand. The knowledge settles in so easily — this marriage happened to someone else, someone who was never fully real in the first place. He thinks it should probably be a lot harder to accept something like that.

_And I’m so tired_

_I’m oh, oh oh so tired_

Oh, god. _That_ can’t possibly be what he’s supposed to get done, can it?

“You cannot be fucking serious,” he mutters out loud. (To whom, he’s not sure.) This is the one day of his life when he absolutely does not have time for this. But he hasn’t tried it yet, and there’s an awful kind of logic to it if you look at it as a _Groundhog Day_ type of personal growth thing? And it’s something he can try that probably doesn’t increase anyone’s risk of death, so okay. Why the fuck not.

He goes downstairs, because he’s always up before everyone else, and gets a cup of coffee, and adds a shot of whiskey from the bar.

Myra’s up by now, most days. Including today, it turns out. The phone call goes about as badly as he expected, given that he’s trying to break up with his wife over the phone from Maine without being able to actually explain anything about why.

He didn’t quite predict the shape that the conversation would take; that her working hypothesis would be that Eddie is drunk, drugged, having a mental health crisis, or possibly has been kidnapped, didn’t he listen to her when she looked up the crime statistics for that b.f.e. town? He’s not himself. She’s going to call the police.

“Myra, there’s a serial killer on the loose, I don’t think they’re prioritizing 911 calls about ‘my husband is very calmly asking me for a divorce.’”

“You are not _‘very calm’!_ I know what you sound like when you’re _calm!_ Did you say SERIAL KILLER?”

He listens to her losing her shit on, to be fair, the most reasonable basis she’s ever had. But what can he say? _You see, Myra, the year before I hit my growth spurt, there was this child-eating alien clown—_

“I can be on a flight to Bangor at NINE o’clock—"

Okay, the last thing this day needs is Myra on a flight to Bangor at nine o'clock, he definitely needs to head _that_ off at the pass. He leans his free hand on the back of an easy chair, looking out the window. “Look, you’re right,” he says. “I mean, you’re right to be angry. I should have dealt with this long ago. I got out here — how long has it even been since I spent a night away, Myra? — and I realized, I can’t do it anymore.”

Really he could say anything that would put an end to this, right? Statistically it seems very likely he’ll die again today and time will turn back again and there won’t be any consequences.

 _Three simple words,_ Homer Simpson says in his head, in a stray memory of Sunday night TV that he wasn’t supposed to watch.

“The truth is, Myra, I could never be who you need me to be. Because… I’m gay.”

Several seconds go by in which he just hears Myra’s sharp breaths, like a cartoon bull toeing the sand, getting ready to charge.

“It’s not fair to either of us to keep trying to make this work. We can — we can talk when I get back to New York. But this is over.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Myra says after a long pause.

And she just fucking… hangs up.

He has a quiet moment before turning around when he realizes all of the Losers are probably standing there listening to him, but he hasn’t looked yet so he can pretend it’s not a sure thing. He looks. They are.

“So,” Richie says, clasping his hands together. “Who _fucked Eddie_ last night!? ‘Cause I know it wasn’t me.”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Bev says.

“Shit, was it _you_ , Bev? I had it narrowed down to the guys, but then again, if you two tried to finally consummate all that sexual tension and it didn’t take—“

Ben has thrown one arm around Richie’s shoulders and tries to just physically cover Richie’s mouth with his other hand, but not with any force, and Richie just pulls his hand down and leans back into Ben’s unintentional embrace.

“This is killing me, Eds. I have to know what happened in the last seven hours to make you decide, _this_ is how I have to start this _specific_ morning.”

“First of all, it hasn’t been seven hours,” Eddie says. “It’s been seven days.”

Richie actually shuts his trap for two whole seconds. Then he says, “I’m guessing you don’t mean metaphori—“

“No, not metaphorically, dickwad.”

“Don’t look at me,” Mike says to Bill, who is indeed looking to him for an explanation. “This is new.”

“You totally sure no one ever m-mentioned time travel?”

“It’s not time travel… exactly. I think. I don’t know. I guess it’s in the time-travel family of phenomena.” Eddie looks at his mug of coffee and suddenly remembers that while he was throwing, like, his entire house into his suitcases all those yesterdays ago, he’s pretty sure he included all the travel coffee stuff. “Shit. I totally wasted a shot of whiskey on this Maine-ass hotel coffee.”

“So to recap,” Richie says. “While we were all trying to sleep last night, you spent a week time-traveling and became cool.”

“Richie, a couple time loops ago you told me a story about something that happened in _someone else’s D &D game._ You would not know cool if it bit you on your dick. Now. Can we focus?”

“Time _loops?”_ Bill says, while Richie laughs so hard he gets actual tears in his eyes.

  
  


They save the kid. It takes, like, all day, and they have to go to the damn festival again, but they get it done without tipping off Pennywise about the time loops or getting stabbed by Bowers, so it’s been a pretty successful day so far, Eddie has to say.

Something strange stands out to him in the crowd of the festival as they’re all standing in a loose circle, catching their breath and contemplating the next steps. The sight catches his eye in flashbulb frames, evolving over fractions of a second.

It looks like a dead guy. Nope, looks like a _specific_ dead guy.

Looks like Patrick Hockstetter, gruesomely and permanently 16, his outsides rotting like his insides.

“Shit, do you guys _see_ tha—“

The thing that looks like Hockstetter slips back out of sight in the crowd, as everyone turns to look, and Eddie’s words are cut off by the now-familiar shock of Bowers’s knife between his ribs.

Bill, who’s closest, instantly jumps on Bowers despite his size disadvantage, and within moments Ben and Mike are on him too, Bev and Richie rushing to help Eddie.

Eddie’s been stabbed a lot of times now, and he seriously does think that the way Richie looks at Eddie being torn away from him, the ragged _no no nonononono_ that comes out of Richie as he’s trying to save him, hurts more than the actual stab wounds. He lets Richie hold him as he collapses and buries his face in Richie’s chest so he doesn’t have to look anymore. Richie says his name over and over.

“It’s okay, Richie. We’ll be together again. It’ll just be a minute.”

“You’re not fucking dying,” Richie says.

“Okay,” Eddie says. “Okay.” This is his seventh time dying and he knows what it feels like, but there’s no reason to insist on that. “Just hold me,” he says.

When the time comes that he does clock out for real, he thinks, when he doesn’t get to come back, it won’t be so bad, if it’s like this. Hopefully not all the bleeding and screaming but the part where he’s in Richie’s arms and hearing Richie’s voice.

“I got you, Eddie. Stay with me. Hang on. I got you.”

They can hear Bowers howling, trying to pull away from where the other guys have him pinned to the ground. “ _He says it’s your time,_ ” Bowers yells.

“Yeah?” Eddie takes a ragged breath, clasping Richie’s hand as tight as he can. “You tell him _I_ said— tell him I—“ and while he’s trying to think of something badass to say he dies.

  
  


/ / / /

  
  


_Gee, but it’s great to be back home_

_Home is where I want to be…_


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spot all the references to other Stephen King creations for a secret prize! There's at least one in each chapter. I did not do this on purpose. It just kind of happened.

_I’ve been on the road so long, my friend_

_And if you came along I know you couldn’t disagree_

For the first time since all this started, Eddie gets up with his alarm like he would normally, back in New York.

He goes over and inspects the little hotel coffee maker in his room, takes off the pot and rinses it out a couple times before using it to heat up some water. He sorts through his smaller suitcase, finds the gift-size dopp kit with the beans and the mini Hario grinder and the travel french press, and makes two cups of coffee. 

It’s just a one-cup press, so he has to do them one at a time, pouring the first cup into one of the hotel mugs, clearing out the grounds in between to start fresh, keeping the second cup in the travel mug for himself. The only sound besides him turning the coffee mill is the chickadee singing outside. 

“I hear you, little buddy,” he murmurs back to the bird as he waits for his phone timer to count down four minutes of steeping time. “You’re doing great out there. Wish me luck.”

He takes the two coffees over to Richie’s door, carefully shifting them into one hand for a moment so he can knock. 

“I remembered something,” he says when Richie answers. “—It’s not anything bad.” 

“...Well, I’m stumped already,” Richie says.

“Can I come in?” 

“Sure.” Richie takes the offered mug as Eddie walks in, takes a whiff and raises his eyebrows. “Did you bring, like, a private stash of fucking Blue Bottle or something? In your nine suitcases?” 

“Yeah. Well, actually it’s Intelligentsia, the thing about Blue Bottle—”

He lets Richie cut him off with a snore, pretending to nod off into his coffee, and Eddie can’t even pretend to look mad about it. He feels warm and fond. He wants to kiss him right now.

Richie takes a tiny sip, then blows a little cooling puff of air, fogging his glasses for a moment. “So. You… remembered something from our lives. Something that wasn’t bad.” 

“No, it’s something good. I think it’s good. I don’t know how I ever forgot.” Eddie thinks he might be doing a little bit of Richie’s patented scared smile himself, right now. 

Richie’s leaning his shoulder against the wall, looking at Eddie with curious eyes, his hair an unbelievable mess of bedhead. It occurs to him, a little late, that maybe there are other reasons not to do this besides just being a giant fucking wuss. Hell, for all he knows Richie already has someone in his life right now that he hasn’t felt comfortable telling the Losers about. Eddie could be about to open a huge can of worms and make everything worse. 

And the prospect of unlimited resets with no consequences isn’t comforting at all. He’s never wanted consequences so much in his life.

“Um,” Eddie says. “I love you. That’s what I remembered. I’m sorry if it’s weird. But… I don’t want to go back into the murder house again without telling you that.”

Richie stares at him, his mouth dropped slightly open, and his face goes through a lot before he finally, shakily, says, “Say something only the real Eddie could come up with.”

“Seriously? I make you coffee with my own coffee from home in my travel French press, at five in the morning, and I— I say all of—”

“It’s good coffee. I don’t usually drink it black, but this coffee fucking owns.”

“Richie.”

“This is what I’ve literally always wanted to happen,” Richie says, looking everywhere but Eddie’s eyes. Eddie’s heart does several backflips, but Richie looks more frustrated than anything, gripping his coffee mug with both hands, tight at his chest like it’s a shield. “The second I saw you last night, it all came back. And I know _he_ knows that.”

“Okay.” Eddie says. “Okay. When did that fuckface ever, no matter what he was pretending to show us, when was he capable of any…”

“Kindness?” Richie says, staring down at his coffee, not even saying _love_ yet.

“Or just… being normal for thirty seconds?”

He can see Richie rolling the words around in his head, as he looks at the cup of coffee, looks at Eddie, looks down again. 

“Look at me, Rich. I’m me.”

Richie looks at him, still a little hunched in on himself, looking like he’s thinking too hard. He lets Eddie take his glasses off and kiss him. 

Eddie tries to make it the softest, sweetest kiss anyone’s ever had which is probably too high a standard to hold himself to, but he doesn’t think Richie deserves anything less. When he pulls back he doesn’t go far. Richie keeps his eyes closed for a couple seconds, nods. Opens his eyes to see Eddie, still there looking up at him, and smiles like a goddamn sunbeam. 

“Wow,” Richie says. It’s a little breathy. 

He finally sets his coffee down and he cups Eddie’s face in his hands and kisses him again, a slow soft kiss and then a quick little one like a dab of a paintbrush. God, it’s _so_ nice. Eddie doesn’t want to do anything but this. Like, ever. He tangles his hands in the soft worn fabric of Richie’s shirt, feeling their kisses down to his toes.

Finally, very reluctantly, Eddie puts a hand on Richie’s chest and leans back and says, “I gotta tell you about something else, too.”

Richie tilts his head. “—I’m sorry, is this like a good news bad news—?”

“Kind of. Yeah. Sorry.”

Eddie explains it all again. Richie has to sit down.

“How many times has it happened?“ Richie says.

Eddie sits beside him on the bed with a sigh, and thinks. “…Pennywise, Bowers, Pennywise, Pennywise, Pennywise, Bowers… Bowers again… yeah, this is number eight.”

“How did you — what happened the first time?”

“Like I said, I, uh, I got killed fighting Pennywise,” he says, and hopes Richie doesn’t ask him to elaborate. “You were there, though, and you took care of me while…” Eddie looks down at their joined hands and runs his thumb along Richie’s knuckles. “You looked after me. And then… I opened my eyes and I was back in the Townhouse.”

“Eddie. Please, please take this loop off. Stay here, do nothing, don’t fucking die.”

“I can’t do that. That’s what I’m so scared about. If I make it through the night and I end the loops, but I haven’t saved everybody. And then I can’t.”

“Eddie,” Richie says so softly, brushing his thumb along Eddie’s cheek right where he hasn’t gotten stabbed yet. Eddie thinks he understands why Richie always laid his personas on so thick, because something inside him was so tender and delicate he couldn’t risk exposing it to sunlight.

“Listen, though,” Richie goes on. “How do you know for sure that the loops only restart when you…“ He looks away again. “…Because, think about it, it could also be happening at the same time every day, right? You wouldn’t have — been there to see it. What if it’s not linked to you?”

Eddie shakes his head. “I told you how there was one time when Pennywise found out the day was repeating? After he found out, he…got me to go to the house alone,” _(he had Bowers kill you just to make me go to the house alone)_ “and then he put me in the deadlights, trying to like, keep me alive in cold storage. I could feel this anger, like Pennywise understood what was going on and he was furious. He didn’t want to let me die. I had to — that one was bad. Anyway, the loops are definitely linked to me.” 

Richie doesn’t say anything, just closes his eyes and holds Eddie’s shoulders very, very tight and leans their foreheads together.

“I’m okay,” Eddie says quietly.

“Eds, you don’t have to — try to make _me_ feel better, jesus.” Richie runs his hands over his arms and back. His touch is grounding. Eddie doesn’t know how he got through his whole adult life so far without this. “Just… lemme know what you need. I’ll be here for you, we, we all will be.”

“I know.” He gives Richie a kiss that he seems almost too disquieted to accept. “We’ll figure it out together.” 

They go downstairs and Eddie explains everything to everyone again. Richie is mostly quiet at first, having heard it already, his face dark with worry. When Eddie starts talking about how they might be able to improve their chances at the ritual, Richie butts in.

“Why are we still doing the fucking ritual if it doesn’t work?” 

“It does work,” Eddie says. “It forces him to manifest himself in a form that we can hurt. I hurt him before. What we don’t know is how to beat him once and for all, and get out alive.”

He understands why Richie shakes his head, staring down. Eddie’s been getting to know that same feeling since this started — the frustration, the fear of not being able to protect those he loves.

“Have we considered,” Richie says, “now hear me out, we are in Maine — have we considered getting a lot of big fucking guns today before we have to fight the space alien in the sewers?”

“That just instinctively seems like a really bad idea,” Bev says as everyone else murmurs variations on the same sentiment.

“I’m not stoked about it myself?” Richie says. “But I mean, one of the things It _was_ vulnerable to last time was Bill straight up shooting It in the head.”

“Bill shot It with a bolt gun that had nothing in the barrel,” Mike says. “Remember that part? Bill _believed_ it was loaded — and then it was. That’s why I thought this ritual was going to work in the first place.”

“Richie — I get where you’re coming from,” Eddie says. “But the house isn’t just where he’s vulnerable to us, it’s also where his powers are strongest, like, the powers that can make people see things that aren’t there, and statistically I don’t see it going well if we then add firearms to that situation.”

“I— yeah, okay.” Richie concedes with a sigh. 

“Plus,” Eddie says, “what kind of sicko would put someone in a time loop where the answer was ‘go to Dick’s and buy a bunch of rifles.’”

“Well—“ Bill puts a hand up. “That’s ass-s-suming this is all b-being done on purpose, by an intelligence with motives we can understand. That’s a lot of assumptions. And yes I have seen _Groundhog Day._ I’ve also s-seen the time loop episode of Next Gen, and the original _12:01 PM…_ ”

“Don’t make me think about that fucking movie right now,” Richie says.

“I haven’t seen that,“ Eddie says.

“DON’T.”

“I mean,” Bill says, “it’s a good movie. Later, when you get out of the time loop. The guy from—”

“Jesus, Bill!” Richie steamrollers over whatever Bill’s fun fact about scary movies was going to be. “Eddie’s gonna have enough PTSD as it is! _If_ this ever ends! Fuck! I probably did this to him, you know.”

Everyone else looks as confused as Eddie feels. “You did what now?” Bill says.

“C’mon, I can’t be the only one that sees it.”

“Is that what happens in _12:01 PM_ or…” Eddie says.

“No, it’s not what happens in _12:01 PM!_ It’s — everyone’s got to be thinking it, it’s the most obvious explanation. Eddie _died._ The first time. We fought It and Eddie _died_ right in front of me. What the fuck do you think would have happened next? I would have made any terrible deal with anyone or anything. I wouldn’t have been logical about it and I’m sure as hell not a good enough _person_ not to do it.

“And that’s why Eddie‘s dying on a loop in this insane fucking sci-fi purgatory, it’s a parting gift from that genius Past Richie, who **saw** _Pet Sematary,_ and yet. —You know, I think I saw _Pet Sematary_ with you, actually.” 

“Richie,” Eddie says.

“In the balcony,” Richie says, more quietly.

“I remember.” Eddie remembers the very tail end of childhood, sneaking through the fire exit into the R-rated matinee, screaming and clinging to Richie’s arm at every jump scare. Eddie could still get away with that, just barely, because anyone could see what a childish and nervous and dramatic little boy he was. But part of him recognized even then that time was running out.

“Richie,” Mike says, gently. “Do you have any _specific_ idea what you think could have happened.”

“No, dude.” Richie has his arms folded on the table. He looks embarrassed now, as well as unhappy. “I didn’t pick up any secret fuckin’ arcane knowledge in the Groundlings. It was just — just a feeling.”

Eddie doesn’t know what to say to Richie, especially in front of everyone. Something tells him that for once the best thing he could do for Richie is get the attention _off_ of him.

“Listen—“ Eddie shakes his head. “We don’t know what’s causing this, and we still don’t know how to find out. We gotta make a plan around what we know. And last time we saved the restaurant kid, it took, like, all day.”

Eddie and Richie go together to get their stuff, but Eddie can't pick up his inhaler until after Keene's opens, so they walk uptown a little way to find food. 

They can’t talk about what they talked about at the hotel now, because they don’t know when Pennywise might have his attention on them. Now Eddie knows what he wants to say, which would be something along the lines of _you’re nuts, this isn’t purgatory, this is a gift, I was going to die, I would have died without even remembering that I love you. If you did this, thank you for saving me. It’s going to be okay._

Since he can’t say it, he wants to try to show it, but that’s complicated by who they are and where they are. Eddie has to hold on to the impulse to just take Richie’s hand as they walk, like he wants to. He could ask? What does Richie think about being seen?

They’re waiting at a crosswalk on the shady, tree-lined street near the bagel place. “Cold out here,” Eddie says.

“Is it,” Richie says with a hint of a smile.

“Yeah. You’re not cold?”

“You’re just trying to get me to—”

“Yeah, I am, obviously.”

Richie’s face scrunches up happily. He wraps an arm around Eddie’s shoulders and pulls him close. Then he turns Eddie towards him and shares his jacket, Eddie sliding his hands in to warm up against Richie’s back. Like young lovers. Like boyfriends.

The light changes on them a couple times before they cross.

The trees lining the street continue down the next block. Climbing merrily in one of them, a brightly colored Star Wars backpack hanging off one shoulder, is the freaking restaurant kid.

Eddie stops and stares up at the kid, who stares back down at them. It takes Richie a second to catch up to what’s going on. “Where the fuck are your _parents?”_ Eddie says.

Dean points a _significant_ distance down the block, where the usual lunch-rush line is milling around outside Hill Street Bagels. Eddie thinks he spots Dean’s parents, plus the baby, near the end of the line.

“Can you like, text them for me?” Richie says. “We’re doing a prank show.”

“I don’t have my phone,” Dean says. “It’s no-screens day.”

“Do most eight-year-olds have phones now?” Eddie says. “What are you even doing with it?”

“I’m nine,” Dean says.

“Oh, okay then,” Eddie says, rubbing his temple.

Dean’s mom and dad, he sees, have noticed the two weird guys talking to their child and decided to give up their place in the bagel line to wander over. Eddie sees the mom turn to the dad as they get closer and say what looks like, “is that—?” and he sees the dad furrow his brow and say “what the fuck.”

“They’re doing a prank show,” Dean helpfully calls down to his parents as they approach.

Eddie sifts through diplomatic options in his head.

“You guys are into some _extreme_ free-range parenting considering that Bowers is running around town stabbing people, like, right now,” Richie says to Dean’s parents.

“I’m sorry, what?” the mom says.

“Is this the prank?” the dad says.

“ _Henry Bowers!_ God, are you guys even from here?”

“Yeah we’re from here, I know who Henry Bowers is,” Dean’s dad says. “I thought he died.”

“He super didn’t! And last night he killed two more people while he was breaking out of the nuthatch! How did you not hear about this?”

“We have a no-screens day on Sundays,” the dad mutters. The mom already has the baby shifted to one arm and her phone out.

Dean, still in the tree, is listening with his jaw dropped open, his eyes like saucers. His mom glances up at him and says, “Do we have to talk about this stuff in front of a nine-year-old child?”

“You let him watch my shit, but you don’t want him to know about Bowers?”

“Well, excuse me for being more concerned about exposing children to _violence_ than bad _language_.”

“That’s not what he means!” Eddie says.

“Don’t yell at my wife, asshole!” Dean’s dad says, although Eddie was totally not yelling. Maybe his and Richie’s tone was coming off a little antagonistic, but nobody was _yelling._

“Yeah, don’t yell at my mom,” Dean says. “Asshole.”

“Jesus christ,” the mom says, staring at her phone. “Dean’s been running around with his friends at the freaking festival this whole weekend.” The dad leans over her shoulder to look at the screen.

“Who’s Bowers?” Dean says.

“Honey,” his mom says, “do you want to head back home and maybe we can make some chili together and play _Call of Duty_ for the rest of the day?”

“It’s no screens,” Dean says, puzzled.

“Well, maybe we could get started on that fort in the back yard together,” the dad says.

“We can all brainstorm for some other cool ideas on the way home,” the mom says. “We’re going home right now.”

“But I didn't get my bagel,” Dean says.

“We all want bagels, Dean,” the dad says. “But we gotta go home.”

Dean glares at Richie and Eddie as he climbs down. “I’m not holding hands with you guys, I’m nine,” he protests as his parents try to each take one hand.

“Big kids have to hold hands sometimes too,” they hear his mom say as the family walks off.

The ritual goes pretty much the same. Eddie’s getting good at this part. It’s scary as fuck feeling the deadlights come down again after what he had to do that one time, but he’s holding hands with his friends, and Richie loves him back, and he can deal with it. 

The chanting has the same result as always, though. Pennywise manifests out of the thing no matter how hard they try to keep him in. When he finds them unafraid and ready to fight, he’s thrown off, but he comes back swinging. And he controls the territory.

“I can’t believe this shit,” Eddie says, standing in front of the stupid fucking doors. “ _Again._ “

“Which one is whi—”

“They change.” Eddie opens Very Scary and it’s the severed legs closet again. “Fuck it, let’s go through this one.”

“What’s in there? Besides irony.”

“Betty Ripsom’s legs. Extremely scary, but they can’t _hurt_ us.”

“Fair enough,” Richie says, following him through the door.

It turns out the top half of the Betty Ripsom monster is there too, and she has more arms than the real Betty Ripsom and they all end in gigantic claws, and she pins Eddie and sinks all her teeth into his chest.

It hurts, like a lot, but it really wouldn’t even be that bad except that Richie is next to him screaming and that’s the absolute worst. It’s getting to the point where he wants to get Richie out of this even more than he wants to get himself out of it.

_“Dying is easy,”_ he thinks to himself, _“comedy is—”_

/ / / /

_I’ve been on the road so long, my friend…_

Eddie gets out of bed and takes a good look at himself in the mirror on the closet door. 

He changes out of his pajama top and gets a soft heathered t-shirt from his suitcase. It hugs the muscles in his arms and makes him feel almost good about himself. 

The shirt makes his pajama bottoms look stupid, so he changes into some nice jeans, which makes him fully overdressed because he knows that, right now, Richie is in bed in the black boxer shorts and comfy old _Swamp Thing_ t-shirt that he’ll be wearing when he answers his hotel room door. But like, Eddie’s feeling kind of into that too.

Richie opens the door and just straight-up checks him out, like Eddie looks so good to him that he forgot he was in the closet.

“Hey,” Eddie says. “Can I come in? We’ve got a situation.”

“I… yeah.” Richie steps aside to let him through and then closes the door behind them. “Didn't you have a wedding ring last night?”

This time Eddie _starts_ by telling Richie all about what’s been happening and briefly recaps most of the major points in chronological order, which makes that first kiss, when they do get there, even better than it was last time, because Richie knows for sure he’s not being messed with and he goes in with total abandon. He’s a shockingly good kisser, hot and hungry and demanding, biting Eddie’s lip and melting his brain. 

Eddie holds on tight and lets himself be kissed senseless. His body doesn’t carry any evidence of the punishment it’s been taking over these etch-a-sketch days, but he can remember what every bit of it has felt like. He wants to memorize all of this instead, every sensation, somehow both indulgent and absolutely necessary. 

“Take this loop off,” Richie asks him again. “Stay here. Come to bed with me. …Or, you know…whatever you want to do. But play hooky for one day. Please.”

Eddie pulls Richie’s head down and kisses him on the neck, on the jaw. “I can’t, I can’t avoid it. There’s no days off. Not until we win.”

“You need to rest, Eds.” Richie runs his hands through his hair. Eddie lets his eyes shut, savoring the feeling. “Have you even slept? This whole time?”

“It resets with my body the way it was, so… it’s _like_ I’ve slept. Physically.”

“Physically,” Richie says.

“It’s okay.”

Richie shakes his head a little, because it’s obviously so not okay, but he doesn’t press the point. Eddie kisses him some more, pulling him closer by his belt loops, feeling Richie hum against his mouth.

Eddie walks them back slowly until the backs of his legs touch the bed, and Richie’s lips are touching his ear as he says “lemme take care of you,” and Eddie sits down and tugs Richie towards him by the hem of his shirt.

Richie leans in happily and starts to drop to his knees in front of him. “Oh, hey, c’mon,” Eddie says.

“Hm?”

He kicks off his slippers and skootches back on the bed. “Get up here. Dorkus.” Richie climbs into bed with him and peels both their shirts off, still kissing, always kissing. 

“…Have we done this before?” Richie asks, lifting himself up a little to look down at Eddie.

“No,” Eddie says softly. “This is the first time. We— kissed, before.” He rocks his hips up as Richie’s palming him through his jeans. “I like your hands,” he says. He doesn’t remember the last time he wanted to say anything even the slightest bit sexy to anybody. 

He _loves_ Richie’s hands. He loves how big they are. He would die of embarrassment if he tried to say that, probably.

“I like your cock,” Richie answers, as he pulls it out. And yeah, abstractly, Eddie did know before now that a dick was something people could really specifically _desire_ and have _opinions_ on; he knew, but he didn’t _know_. Now he knows. Richie’s kissing his way down his chest, and he thinks he’d really like to get acquainted with — with Richie’s dick, which he hasn’t gotten to see yet, can only extrapolate about from the feel of Richie’s ( _big_ ) hands.

Richie flicks his tongue across a nipple on his way down, mouths at the line of hair down Eddie’s stomach. He makes it obvious how much he wants to linger, if only Eddie had agreed to take the day. Eddie can’t help the sounds that are coming out of him, he’s so in love and so turned on and it’s so, so fucking good to be alive. 

He sees that Richie’s jerking himself off while he blows him. There are about ten million things Eddie wants to say right now, and he can’t figure out the polite-sounding way to say _don’t come yet, I want to make you come,_ and although he can make an educated guess he doesn’t know for _sure_ if the bossy way would be sexy to Richie?

“Richie, fuck, Richie.” Richie’s arm is going furiously. “Wait,” he says, and Richie’s mouth pops off of him. 

“What’s up?”

“I just. I’m not afraid to touch your dick, you know.” _Great, that was very smooth, Eds. You are good at saying words to other humans while they’re having sex with you._

Richie laughs and puts both his hands on Eddie’s thighs and comes up to kiss him. “I mean,” Eddie says, catching Richie’s mouth over and over, “you can do whatever you want, I’m not trying to boss you around I just,”

“Mm, no, I know,” Richie says reassuringly, kissing him on the ear, stroking him again, grinding his erection against Eddie’s thigh. “It’s good. It’s all super good.” Eddie gently plays with his hair as he goes back down.

Richie feels amazing. Eddie gets kind of loud, not on purpose, but he’s fucking dealing with a lot and he can’t control everything. 

Richie kisses him right after, tasting of him, and Eddie doesn’t even mind. He kisses hard and increasingly sloppy as Eddie finally gets a hand into his boxers and brings him off, making Richie make soft shuddery noises into his mouth. 

They lie tangled together for not _nearly_ long enough before Richie gets a text, which Eddie doesn’t remember happening before. “Mmph. Fuck,” Eddie says, realizing how much lighter out it is than when he came in. “Mike’s probably wondering—”

Richie is covering his face and looking at his phone like he’s watching a slasher flick. “Bill,” he says, his voice muffled against his hand, “says, quote, congrats on the sex but unfortunately we are on a timetable.”

Eddie groans. “I wasn’t _that_ loud.”

“It’s a very small, old hotel, Eddie baby,” Richie says, tracing his finger along Eddie’s arm. His face is pink, but there’s some laughter in his eyes too. “I guess at least we don’t have to try to figure out if they know.”

“Well. Bill’s right, we’re on more of a timetable than he knows.” Eddie looks around for his shirt, and Richie hands it to him. “You okay?” he says to Richie, more quietly. “Like, with them knowing about us?”

“Of course, it’s, it’s the Losers, of course it’s okay.” Richie half-smiles, watching Eddie get dressed. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s still viscerally terrifying, but now I remember why, so, it’s okay.”

Eddie kisses him tenderly on the cheek. “You’re braver than you think,” he says.

The afterglow holds up until Eddie gets to the foot of the stairway, looks at the rest of his friends, and remembers that he has to explain all the time loops and deaths and everything to them again now. He lets Richie help this time around. 

Everyone’s looking at him with those sympathetic, worried eyes again, hearing it all again for the first time. Each of them already trying to work out how to fix it, in their own way.

“Guys, I’m sorry I’m the one stuck in this,” Eddie says. 

“What are you talking about?” Bill says.

“I think if any of you were the ones keeping your memories, you would’ve solved this shit by now.” Eddie’s been thinking it for a while. All this time, experiencing something that probably no human ever has before, and all he’s managed to do is fall in love. Actually all he did was remember that he was in love already.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Eds,” Bev says. “Look at everything you’ve had to do, and you’ve still kept it together.”

“I, I don’t know what it is,” Eddie says. “I think I’m a relatively smart guy. But after all this time I’m not any closer to working it out. Mike even let me read his journal thing.”

“I’ve got like 20 of these,” Mike says, holding up the book in question. “And look where that’s gotten us.” 

Right, Eddie remembers, Mike always kind of loses his shit when he finds out what happened the first time.

“It got us this far,” Eddie says. “You think that’s nothing? Without you, this thing would just be eating kids for another year. You did the right thing calling us, Mike. We’re the adults now, we are going to fucking finish this.”

“He’s right,” Bill says. “If it’s up to us, then it’s up to us.” He looks around the table. “I’m not scared to die,” he says, which is such a fucking Bill thing to say. “I’m scared of It winning.”

“Speak for yourself, I am _extremely_ scared to die,” Eddie says. “But if that’s what has to happen to stop this thing from taking any more kids, then… I’m okay with that.” It’s tough to say the next part but it feels necessary, because he’s had a week and a half to think about what’s still raw for the others. And maybe because he’s been to the other side and back, and that’s helped him feel like he knows. “I think Stanley would say the same thing, too.”

They’re quiet for a minute. Richie rubs his thumb along the scar on Eddie’s palm like a worry stone, thinking hard. “We need a bigger boat,” he says. 

“Like what?” Eddie says, silently adding _please don’t say guns again._ But somehow Eddie gets the feeling that he's not going to say guns again.

“Mike… is there, like… a _good_ It? Did you ever hear about anything like that, anywhere at all?”

“…Kind of,” Mike says, reluctantly, which surprises Eddie, because he doesn’t remember anything about that from what he saw of Mike’s notes. “But even if any of it was true… he’s been gone for a long time.”

“A ‘long time’ as in…?”

“As in, before _homo sapiens_.” Mike flips his journal open and glances at a couple tabbed pages before shaking his head, seeming not to find what he’s looking for in this volume. “Everywhere he was mentioned it was different, and always very fragmented. He was called Maturin.”

“Like in M… _Master and Commander_?” Bill says incredulously. 

“Yup,” Mike answers, with the tone of someone who needs weird facts to be _much_ weirder than that before he’s going to follow up on them. “Those who believe he was real say that It either killed him, or hurt him so badly that he hasn’t been able to come back. Some believe he’s trapped somewhere, although the ‘where’ doesn’t seem to necessarily be, uh, on the material plane of existence as we understand it.”

“It would make sense,” Richie says. “Helps explain why the Eater of Worlds lives in the sewers under one shitty town in Maine. What if in that last fight with… what’s-his-name, Pennywise got his ass kicked pretty bad too?”

“Does that mean what we’ve been fighting is Pennywise _below_ his full capacity? ‘Cause I don’t like that,” Ben says.

“If all this is true — if this other guy exists — how would we get him to help us? If he even can?” Eddie says.

“Maybe he already did,” Bev says. She gestures towards Eddie.

“…Mike?” Richie says. “Could he do this? I mean, I get that if Groundhog Day powers were specifically mentioned you’d have told us that by now, but.”

Mike shakes his head. “It could be for all we know. But not a lot is mentioned about his powers, full stop.”

“So how would we even start to find out if he could be involved,” Ben says, and Eddie remembers. 

“Wait,” Eddie says. “There was something. Once, when It found out about the time loops, It used the deadlights to try to stop me from resetting. And it seemed like It was angry, like It knew something about this that we didn’t know. But that wasn’t all. When I was in the deadlights, it felt like maybe... something else was there? Someone else? A sound that was trying to become audible? I know that doesn’t make any logical sense, but it’s the only way I can describe it.”

There’s a palpable feeling of hope around the table. “It has to mean something. He wants to help us,” Bill says.

“Or,” Bev says, “he wants us to help him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, once I started thinking about involving Maturin, I decided I wanted to come up with a new adaptation of the character and his lore for the Muschetti universe rather than try to transplant him as he appears in King’s novels. (He's still a turtle, though, don't worry.)
> 
> Thanks for your patience if you’re reading along. I got conked out pretty bad by a head cold in the first part of the month. Happy new year!
> 
> And a special thank you to [queermccoy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/queermccoy/pseuds/queermccoy) for answering my local research questions, specifically the ones about "...But I don't understand, where do they line up for _brunch._ "


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wanted to say thank you once again to those reading along. This is my first time trying to serialize a fully plotted story, and I think it’s also the longest single fic I’ve posted anywhere. Figuring out how it divides into segments is a learning experience, but I think it's all figured out now, and most importantly (to me) the final chapter sizes won't be asymmetrical enough to bother me. ;)
> 
> *

Eddie sees that Ben’s leaning back from the table, pensive. “Why us?” Ben says.

“What do you mean?” Bill asks.

“Well, we know that the ritual Mike found has been performed before, at least once. And that can’t be the only time people have tried to do something. We don’t know what anyone might have done in, like, 1881—”

“Christ you’re good at math,” Richie mutters.

“—if they all just got killed. Or got away and then forgot and… possibly died horrible deaths because of the trauma they couldn’t remember. There must have been others. So, what are we doing that’s so different?”

“I think… maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it,” Mike says. “ _If_ some of the legends are true, and Maturin is alive… maybe he gets stronger every time. And everyone who’s fought It for half a million years has made a change.”

“That’s very beautiful,” Richie says. “But, you know, I’m sorry, call me a small-picture thinker. I want to know how _we_ get the lid off the jar.”

“I might be kind of stuck here until we do,” Eddie points out.

“That… is so not an acceptable answer. We have six very overeducated people in this room and there has to be something better than ‘put Eddie through the meat grinder until it works.’”

“Rich…” Eddie puts his hand on Richie’s arm. “I know you don’t want me to get hurt.”

“You’re right,” Richie says. “I don’t.”

“Eddie, I have a thought,” Bill says. “Somehow the deadlights gave you a way to connect with this… presence. D-do you think if you went in-into the deadlights again, intentionally—”

_“How about **no** ,”_ Richie says, almost pleadingly this time.

“Or if _someone_ does. Look, all the options are terrible,” Bill says. “But we weren’t in the deadlights, we don’t know.”

“I actually was in the deadlights, but then I wasn’t, and now I don’t remember it,” Richie says, “and I hate all of this.”

Eddie looks over at Bev, because honestly, he doesn’t think he could do it, not just in terms of willingness but in terms of actual possibility, but if she thinks she could do it, then he has to try to do it.

“Guys, it doesn’t work like that,” Bev says. “You can… perceive things, in a way, but it’s not like being conscious, it’s not like being unconscious — it’s not like anything I can describe. I can’t imagine communicating with anything while you were experiencing that. And I don’t want to think about what going through it repeatedly would do to a person.”

“ _Thank_ you,” Richie says, with a see-she-gets-it gesture.

“Don’t thank me,” Bev says. “I don’t have a better idea.”

“And according to Eddie we don’t have all day to talk about it,” Mike says.

Eddie nods. “We don’t.”

Richie takes Eddie’s hand again and squeezes his fingers. “So…” He looks to Eddie. “What the fuck do we do tonight?”

Eddie squeezes back. “Our best?”

There’s a moment that night, watching their artifacts catch fire in the cistern under the house, when Eddie’s pretty sure he feels it again. That intangible presence that might be their ally, trying to pull through.

“Does anyone else…?” Eddie says.

“Yeah,” Richie says. He squeezes Eddie’s hand. And Eddie can’t, like, read his mind to see if it’s the same feeling, but he thinks it probably is.

He looks at the others, but they all look uncertain. Beverly frowns into the middle distance, like someone trying to figure out if they really hear the sound you heard or if they just think they do. Ben just shakes his head.

Then there’s no more time to confer about it, as the deadlights spin down. 

“FILTHY LITTLE CHILDREN,” says the spider-clown when he shows up again. They have a battle plan, so he doesn’t get to monologue much. Mike and Ben and Richie have already run down the cavern during the dramatic balloon buildup because they’re the biggest and they need to get into position for the other three to lead It through the narrow passageway. Eddie throws the fence post into It as soon as it comes into view, then takes off with Bill and Bev.

They don’t get It through the passageway, but they do lose track of each other again. Or at least Eddie loses track of everybody else.

For the fucking _life_ of him, Eddie cannot figure out how they keep getting separated in here. Yeah, the house is still magic, but—

“Guys?” Eddie says, as loud and clear as he can, looking from one corridor to the next. “I can’t see you, but I know you’re there.” 

He does not, in fact, know they’re there. The house has killed before, it could kill again. Eddie doesn’t understand how this place works, and he’s not sure how he ever can. Richie’s right. They need a bigger fucking boat.

“We’re not afraid of you!” Eddie says to the creature as It looms over him. “That has to fucking _count_ for something!”

“Who’s ‘we,’ Eddie?” The clown’s voice bubbles around him, thick with cruel giggles. “Where are all your friends?”

“RIGHT HERE WITH ME, ASSHOLE!” He yells out their names like the litany of an exorcism. _“Richie, Bill, Beverly, Mike, Ben, Stanley!—”_

The lights come for him again, this time not for stasis but for the kill.

_richie billm_ _ri_

_e bb r i_

_b_

_y_

_n yses oe_

_g o e dw oa_

_fesd bh t i_

_ena issld r s_

_rs w s rs l s_

_oo sss shsd_

/ / / /

“ _Fuck_ ,” Eddie says as he wakes back into what his brain can process as reality. 

He’s… surprised to be alive this time. That one felt worse. 

He puts a jacket on over his PJs. He’s never needed one on the other mornings, but it helps now. The pre-dawn light feels soulless and cold. The music on his alarm felt distant, and noisy, like he’d left the music part of his mind down there.

All he can think is _Richie._ If he can see Richie and hold him, warm and alive, and sleep a few minutes in his arms before they have to start this day, then… then he can think about what’s next. 

“Hey,” Richie says when he answers his door. “Rough night?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He’s still a ways from pulling himself together, but seeing Richie is like having the color come back into his vision. Richie lets him in. 

“You wanna sit?” He puts a hand on Eddie’s shoulder.

Eddie looks over at Richie’s bed. “Can I — lay down in here for a while? With you?”

Richie gives him a weird, sad look, and lets go of his shoulder, and says “…No.”

“Okay,” Eddie nods. It’s good just being here.

Richie takes a long pause, looking like he’s trying to get the next part out. “I’m sorry, man,” he says, fast but resolute. “I can’t put myself through any more weird straight guy bullshit. Not with — not today. Not here.”

“Shit. Wait. Fuck. No,” Eddie says, stricken, fully snapped out of it. “No, Richie, listen.”

“It’s fine. We don’t have to talk about it. Can we _please_ not talk about it.”

“It’s not — what you said.” (Eddie feels himself opening a new to-do folder in his mind for when all this is over, labeled _People I Don’t Even Know but Now I’m Gonna Have to Find Them and Kick Their Asses._ ) “I have to tell you something. I have to tell you a lot of things.”

“Eddie—” Richie sighs, shaking his head.

“Will you please just listen to me. Please. For a second. It’s me. It’s us. Trust me.”

Richie runs a hand through his mess of hair, standing apart, clearly not sure what to think.

“Okay.” Eddie scrubs his hands over his face. “This is way harder than usual because I’m all fucked up this morning. But I know you always end up being there for me.”

“You might be the first person to accuse me of that,” Richie says. But he sits down, on the edge of the bed, and gives Eddie time to take a breath.

“I keep dying and reliving this day over and over and we haven’t figured out what’s making it happen or how to fix it, we need to kill Pennywise and we don’t know how, and it’s been pretty bad, but not all bad, because when we were trying to figure out what was going on you told everyone you were gay,” Eddie takes another long breath, “and it took a while but it finally made me remember how I feel about you, how I’ve, always felt about you, uh, and I made you coffee, and we talked, and yesterday, or, the today before this one—“ he rubs the back of his neck and looks out the window, “I uh, came back over in the morning again and uh, andweslepttogether, for the first time, and — yeah. But I died again, I died in the deadlights, it was even worse than the _other_ time I died in the deadlights, and I woke up, and I just wanted to come right back to you, not for the sex because I, I can’t have that be a thing we keep doing when you might have to forget it—”

“I mean,” Richie says. “It’s cool with me. I get from your perspective it could be a little bit like you got stuck with the homeliest robot in Westworld, but I’m always gonna want to, trust me.”

“You believe me, right?”

“Of course I believe you,” Richie says. “C’mere.” He carefully pulls Eddie to the bed and Eddie gratefully settles himself onto Richie’s chest and listens to his heart, going a little fast but strong and true. 

This is real: Richie’s pulse, Richie’s breath, Richie’s arms warm around him. The light of the sun finding its way into their bed. The song of a little bird outside. The barely perceptible creaks and squeaks of other people moving around in this little old building, probably in the same order as usual. 

Eddie’s breathing has evened out by the time his phone beeps. “You set an alarm for how long we can cuddle?” Richie says. Eddie feels the vibrations of Richie’s voice through his chest and hates that he has to move.

“We’ve got a big day,” Eddie says. He half-sits and picks up his phone. He looks back to Richie, and gets lost in his thoughts for a second.

“You’re handsome, you know,” he says to Richie, who looks honestly baffled.

“Um?”

“You said that thing before about _Westworld_ and I didn’t say anything… You’re a good-looking man,” Eddie says, feeling like he might be blushing a little even though yesterday morning he was kissing the moans out of Richie’s mouth as he clutched at Eddie’s back and came in his hand. “I like looking at you.”

Richie laughs and covers his face. “Dude. You can’t just do that.”

“Do what? Give you a compliment?”

“Yeah, Eds, I’m severely allergic, please have some consideration of my health needs.”

“Fucking dork.” He runs his fingers through Richie’s hair. “C’mon, we gotta get up. We can sleep in tomorrow.”

Richie takes Eddie’s hand and kisses his palm. “We can and we will.” It’s a promise Richie has absolutely no right to make, but Eddie lets it sustain him anyway.

Eddie is back in his room when he realizes he was so fucked up from the deadlights he forgot to take his wedding ring back off when he woke up this morning. He yanks it away like it’s a spider crawling on his hand, and gets dressed in a hurry.

“I have an idea,” Eddie says when everyone’s together downstairs, which makes everyone except Richie look at him funny. “Pennywise is weakest during the day, are we agreed on that?”

Everyone else looks at Mike. Mike says, “…sure?”

“So that’s when we need to start taking the fight to him.” Bill is already opening his mouth as Eddie adds, “I need to ask everyone to _please_ save their questions for the end.”

He gets through the very basics of the time-loop situation and into a few details before Mike cuts in. “I know you said to wait until you were done, but,” Mike says.

“No, go ahead.”

Mike starts pushing out his chair. “Here’s the thing, somebody should head out alone.”

“Are you shitting me?” Richie says.

“Eddie said Pennywise has found out about this before,” Mike says very patiently, “and it limits how much we can talk about it. We should keep his attention occupied so we have time to plan.” The terrible thing about this, Eddie realizes, is that it’s probably a really useful idea. “I’ll go,” Mike goes on. “I can start with Stan’s artifact at the clubhouse, and get It following me.”

Bill puts his hand on Mike’s arm, shaking his head. “I can do it.”

“It’s okay. You guys have this covered.” Mike slides his notebook forward, like his fucking magic encyclopedia is the main reason they’d want to hang on to him.

“You’ve had to go it alone long enough,” Bill says. “Let me take this.” He gets up and pulls his jacket on. “Besides. You heard what Eddie said ab…bout my house. That motherfucker’s looking for me. He can c-c-come and get me.”

“Please remember to not die while you’re being the bait?” Richie says.

“Pennywise isn't trying to kill any of us this early in the morning,” Eddie says. “He just wants it to be horrible. Keep that in mind, because it will be.”

“Got it,” Bill says.

Eddie tries to think if there’s anything else he should make sure Bill knows before splitting off. “Oh yeah, everybody, if you see Bowers at any point, _run away and call the fucking cops_. Do not engage Bowers. He’s killed me, he’s killed Richie, he had a _very_ close call with Mike.”

“Jesus,” Bill says, looking at Mike. 

“Yeah. _Look_ at Mike, okay? Mike kicked Bowers’s ass when we were 13, he grew up into this fuckin’... _specimen_ , and he still barely survived the Bowers rematch, so everybody please be careful.”

“I feel like we haven’t talked enough about how hot Mike wound up being,” Richie says. 

“I’m leaving now,” Bill says. 

“Don’t feel bad, Bill,” Richie says as he leaves. “You’re kinda sexy in a novelist way!”

“That’s depressing to know,” Mike says to Eddie.

“What, that Bill’s kind of sexy?” Richie says. Christ, maybe next time around Eddie _should_ have sex with him again first thing in the morning, he doesn’t remember Richie being this hyper yesterday.

“The Bowers situation,” Mike says.

“Yeah, man,” Eddie says. “I mean, there’s no shame in it, he got the drop on you, it was a long day. Somehow when he grew up, he got stronger _and_ sneakier. Now it takes at least two of us to take him down.”

“The Dark Side is a pathway to many abilities—”

“Oh my fucking god, Richie.”

“—some consider to be _un-natural,_ “ Richie finishes, leaning his face close to Eddie’s as he cracks up laughing in spite of himself.

“Guys,” Mike says. “Bill’s not out there looking for Pennywise alone so that we can fuck around.”

“Sorry,” Richie and Eddie say in unison, and then Eddie has to make himself look away so he won’t catch Richie’s eye, and gets to work filling in the rest of what he knows for everyone.

“Maturin, like in _Master and Commander?”_ Beverly says.

“Not very much like him, I’m assuming,” Eddie says.

“It is spelled the same way,” Mike says. “Some of the time.”

“Bill’s gonna want to know all this shit,” Ben says.

“He can catch up later while I go out on my own, right?” Bev says, and some of the others look at her in puzzlement. “I have to see Pennywise too, before we can have everything for the ritual.”

“From what you’ve told me, yeah,” Eddie says. Bev looks clearly not thrilled about it, but ready to take it on. Ben, on the other hand, looks sad as hell.

“So, I can do that, and if Richie goes to the arcade at the same time — then we have everything and we could get to Neibolt in the middle of the morning, right? The earlier we go, the less powerful It is, by Eddie’s argument. And I think you’re right, Eddie.”

Eddie sighs. “We’ll have everything except I can’t get my fucking inhaler until like, one-thirty in the afternoon, because Keene’s is barely open on Sundays. I should’ve told them to call it in at CVS or something, but, y’know. There’s a **lot** of things I should’ve done differently before going to bed that night. Last night. Saturday. You know what I mean.”

Ben looks thoughtful. “Does it have to be your inhaler, just because that’s what it was before?”

Eddie spreads his hands out in a beats-me gesture and looks to Mike, who does the same. 

“I appreciate your confidence in me, but I don’t have a magic-symbol-o-meter we can use to check,” Mike says. 

“Everyone would have had their own path,” Ben says, “according to what you said. Some of the mementos we had were precious, some of them were painful.”

“In a way they’re all kind of both,” Eddie says.

Richie looks at him sidelong for that. “Eds, I don’t know if I agree a hundred percent with your police work there.”

“Hey,” Bev says, nudging her shoulder against Richie’s. “You remember being chased out of that arcade. I remember how you were _always_ there. Before and after. You didn’t let them scare you away from the things you loved.”

Richie looks at his hands. “That’s very generous,” he says. “I, uh… I hope I don’t have to believe what you just said for the ritual to work, but thanks. I’ll think about that.” Then he looks up and suddenly says, “Oh, I— wow. Actually, I just fucking remembered something. Ha. Jesus.”

“What’s that?” Bev says.

“None of your business,” Richie says to her, smiling but also looking kind of teary at the same time.

Ben’s phone buzzes. 

“Bill wants to know where exactly the fuck I built that clubhouse,” Ben says.

“ _This_ is why we shouldn’t have let Bill go out alone,” Bev says.

“I’ll try to figure out where he’s at,” Ben says, calling. 

It rings a few times before they all hear Bill’s voice clearly from the speaker. 

“Never mind!” Bill says. “Found it.” He sounds like someone who may possibly have just fallen through a weak spot in the forest floor and crashed down a ladder.

“You okay?” Ben says.

“Yeah, I’m good!” Bill coughs a couple times. 

Eddie winces. Hopefully Bill didn’t get too hurt falling through there. Ben was fine, after all, and Ben must have like 50 pounds on Bill, who’s actually, despite what Richie said the first time, Bill is shorter than Eddie. Eddie is, in actual fact, the _third_ smallest Loser, thank you Richie.

_Richie was just being annoying because he turned back into a teenager around you,_ Eddie reminds himself. _Because you were his first crush too. He remembered that even before you did._

“Hang on,” Eddie says. 

“What’s up?” Ben says, looking over to him.

Eddie tries to call up the current state of the clubhouse in his mind’s eye. “Gimme the phone,” he says, snapping his fingers like a douchebag. Ben hands it over with a bemused look. “Hey, it’s Eddie, can you look for something for me?”

“Sure thing.”

“Do you see any of our old magazines and comics down there?”

“Lemme see. P-poster’s up here, hammock c-corner must have been here…” There’s a little grunt from Bill, as though he’s crouching down. “Oh shit, that’s right, those s-stacks of old movie mags Richie used to get from the ten-cent bins. I’m looking at a bunch of ‘em now. Uh…hope you w-weren’t planning to eBay any of these.”

Eddie laughs. “What looks the least eaten by termites?”

“Hmm. I got a _Monster Land_ here in Very Poor condition, maybe z-zero point five shading into a one point oh? February ’86, ‘WEREWOLVES, VAMPIRES & NIGHTMARES.’”

“Perfect, grab that.”

“Got it,” Bill says. “I think I see where you’re going with this. A little abstract, but I dig it.”

“It’s a little abstract says the guy that wrote the _Obelisk of Shadows_ trilogy,” Eddie says, and Mike snorts behind his hand.

“J-jesus, you know, this is m-m-my livelihood you guys keep talking about. This is-is what I — I do for a —”

Bill suddenly breaks off, and in a much lower register, says, _“Shit.”_

“Bill, you okay?” Eddie says.

“I’ll call you guys back,” Bill says, and hangs up.

Eddie looks at Ben’s phone, and then sets it down on the table. “He’ll call us back,” he says to the others.

Richie looks at the silent phone. “Wow, I hate this.”

“Yeah,” Ben says. “…He knows what he’s doing, though. This is the reason he’s out there. We have to remember that.”

“I still fucking hate it.”

“Yeah, this is the worst,” Beverly says. They all stare down at Ben’s phone. She turns to Eddie. “Is this what it’s been like? For…”

“It’s been… It’s been like a lot of things,” Eddie says. 

She takes his hand. “It must be lonely,” she says gently.

Eddie thinks about it. “No,” he says. “Some of it’s been really sad, and scary, and disgusting. There’s been a lot of stuff that hurt. But it hasn’t been lonely. Not at all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I almost forgot! In case you somehow haven't yet read [this great fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21677965?view_full_work=true) by QueerOnTilMorning, pls note that I am **not** the inventor of Bill Denbrough's _Obelisk of Shadows_ trilogy, merely a devoted fan. ;)


	5. Chapter 5

They go through a couple pots of coffee before Bill makes contact again. Everyone gets quiet as Mike checks his phone.

“’This 100% sucked,’” Mike reads out, “‘all these things better be magic as hell, omw back now.’”

“Okay,” Bev says. “Guess that’s me, then.”

“You gonna be okay?” Ben says.

“Nope!” Bev says. “But I know where I need to go.” She squeezes Ben’s shoulder with a determined little smile. Ben has those big sad eyes again. A golden retriever, that’s what Ben reminds Eddie of.

Richie finishes off his coffee and sighs. “Well, I’ve got a date with a run-down movie theater. Let’s go, Marsh.”

Then Eddie watches Richie and Bev walk off again to places where he can’t do anything to protect them, and he kind of wishes he did have his inhaler.

“I feel like this coffee needs something,” Ben says, getting up. He takes his cup of coffee with him and pokes around behind the bar, but he doesn’t end up pouring anything; he just picks up bottles and stares at the labels and puts them back.

“I haven’t _seen_ anyone that works here since I checked in,” Eddie says. “That’s weird, right?”

“I think you guys have the entire place,” Mike says with a shrug. “Joe gave you his cell number, right? He’s probably still asleep next door.” 

Eddie vaguely remembers meeting the Townhouse’s manager, an affable man with a curiously patterned salt-and-pepper beard, when he checked in several yesterdays ago. Eddie was pretty out of it at the time, what with everything. Now that Mike’s reminded him of the guy’s name, Eddie scrolls through his contacts and finds that he’s right.

Before long, Bill comes in and drops his messenger bag in the middle of the table. He goes over to the bar, takes a bottle of whiskey out of Ben’s hand, pours himself a shot, and downs it without a word. Then he comes back to the table, opens his bag, and presents Eddie with a crumbling issue of _Monster Land_ magazine. Inside the bag Eddie can see a wadded-up shower cap, and behind it the corner of a waxed paper boat, folded flat and tucked into an inner pocket.

“I’ve done all that shit b-before?” Bill says, after sitting at the table for a few minutes. 

“Uh, some of it.”

“And I’m p-probably gonna do it again.”

“Possibly,” Eddie says. “I mean, the data set is…” He spreads his hands out in a gesture that he hopes encompasses _limited, bugfuck insane, and not actually compatible with science,_ and Bill nods.

Eddie looks at the soft, beaten-up magazine that Bill retrieved for him and traces his finger over the cover, a splash photo of a very cheap-looking werewolf from a movie he’s never heard of. Has this exact magazine ever been in his hands before? He can’t remember. But he thinks it’ll do.

Ben, eventually, comes back around the bar. “Guys, you need to explain to Bill about the rest of the weird stuff.”

“The _weird_ stuff,” Bill repeats, warily. As Eddie and Mike glance at each other, he waves a hand. “No, no, go ahead. Let me have it. Ready when you are.”

They all roll up to the Neibolt house at, like, 11 AM. Bev and Richie meet them there; Bev looks like crap, Richie looks a little guilty that he doesn’t look more like crap.

“All right, guys?” Mike says.

“I got my thing while Bev was doing her thing,” Richie says. “So I didn’t even see him. Hope that doesn’t make this shit less magic.”

“Bev, you okay?”

“I mean, that was extremely scary and disgusting,” Bev says. She sighs. “But, it also… I remembered how I always made my own place in the middle of it that was safe and clean. I had little things that were just mine, and it helped me survive. I needed to remember that.”

When all this is over Eddie will remember to go and hug Bev for at least an hour solid, but at the moment they’ve gone to some trouble to get the ancient ritual started before lunchtime, so everyone settles for a quick flurry of wordless hugs and shoulder-pats before heading over the threshold again.

The house itself seems taken by surprise as they come in. Crazy shit flies out at them from all sides; they stick together, holding hands like kindergarteners on a field trip, and Eddie navigates. He’s never been able to really get a bead on the passage of time in here, and that used to make navigation harder. But he’s let go of worrying about that by now. He knows the way.

When they get to the cistern, they all take hands in a circle for a minute instinctively before actually putting their artifacts in the thing. It’s not the first time that’s happened. Everything just feels more manageable the more time they spend holding hands, Eddie thinks.

“I just wish we had… something more we could do before going through with this,” Bev says. “To weaken It, or to strengthen Maturin, if he’s out there.”

“What’s the opposite of It?” Bill asks. The writer’s brain, still seeking the patterns and meaning. “The opposite of this place?”

“…Hey, Rich,” Eddie says, letting go of Richie’s and Bev’s hands. He takes hold of Richie’s jacket gently, on either side of the open zippers, and kisses him. For Richie this is their first kiss, again. Richie melts into him, tender hands skating over Eddie’s face and tilting up his chin, kissing deeper. Eddie can’t remember if everyone else knows about them this time or not, but he doesn’t feel like it matters.

Someone, he thinks Ben, quietly goes, “Huh.”

When they pull away, Richie does seem a little bit aware they have an audience because what he says is, “Okay, to clarify, are we making out with everybody or...?” 

“You’re such an asshole,” Eddie says, shaking his head and grinning so hard his face hurts. “You’re not funny at all.” 

“I know,” Richie says, and kisses him again. It feels like they’re making this cursed place clean.

“Beverly?” Ben says after a second. “Look, uh — I sent you that poem, I know you think it’s Bill, just like you did back then, because you liked him more, and that’s okay, I— I don’t think you, like, owe me something because I wrote a secret admirer note in 1989? But I can’t help thinking that… keeping secrets from each other right now is just going to—“

“Ben,” she says with wonder. “Of course. How could I ever have forgotten?”

“We all forgot,” Ben says, so gently. “We didn’t have a choice.”

“The deadlights,” she says, touching Ben’s cheek.

“She seriously didn’t remember that until now?” Richie says to Eddie under his breath. “The whole being woken up out of the deadlights by true love’s kiss?”

“Shh. I didn’t remember I loved you ‘til I’d died like seven times.” Richie’s fingers twitch at his sleeve, and he remembers that he might not have actually said that part in so many words yet this time around.

“On the record,” Bill says, “there is no one here I would not make out with if it’ll help. Or j-just in general, after one an-and a half beers, m-m-maxi-ma— tops.” Mike laughs and puts an arm around Bill’s shoulder and kisses his forehead. (Good god, Mike is _tall._ Not that Eddie didn’t notice before, but, Mike could carry Bill in his pocket, what the hell.) 

Then Bill and Mike grab the sides of each other’s heads and just kiss right smack on the mouth. Eddie’s not sure if it looks like more of a lovers’ kiss or an end-of-Thelma-and-Louise kiss, but he’s pretty sure that doesn’t matter either.

“All right,” Bill says, still holding on to Mike’s face and kind of laughing. “Are we ready to kill this fucking clown, or what?”

“Uh. Who wants to go first?” Eddie says.

“I will.” Mike sets down the ceremonial urn thing in the center of the circle, and then takes out his rock to show everyone again.

“From the rock fight,” Mike says. “The day these bonds were forged. See there, Bev? That’s where you hit Bowers.”

“How do you _have_ that?” Richie says. 

Everyone looks at Richie, and he says, “What? It was 27 years ago, it’s not an unreasonable — fine, I’ll go fuck myself.”

Mike turns the rock over in his hand silently. Then he says, “I went back and got it.”

“Okay, I guess I did walk into that,” Richie says, or starts to say, but Mike interrupts him to continue.

“I went back that summer. When we were all separated. I went to the Barrens one day, just to think. I found the spot where we were, and I found this. And I took it, to keep a piece of what happened, because — that had been the best day of my life. When we all found each other and we fought for each other. When we showed we didn’t have to live in fear.” He pauses.

“But you saw It there too,” Bev supplies, understanding dawning on her face.

“Yeah. It had a different story. It told me… _that was the best day of your life, because you got to turn the violence back on them. you finally got to draw blood yourself._ That’s how he wanted me to see this. _No matter who you try to become, this town’s violence will always define you_.”

“I’m gonna _cry,”_ says Bev, who is definitely already crying. Bill grabs Mike and hugs him really tight, and Richie hugs him from the other side.

“Hey, it’s all right,” Mike says quietly from the middle of the sandwich, his eyes closed. “It’s okay.”

“We all love you so much, Mikey,” Richie says. “You know that, right?”

“I love you guys,” Mike says. They part the hug and Mike kneels down to drop his rock. “And we won’t let him lie to us anymore.”

Since everyone’s already kind of teary — and since Bill is the next one going clockwise anyway — Bill goes next, setting Stan’s bonnet and Georgie’s boat gently into the urn. Then it’s Bev and then Ben, with their complementary set of treasures.

Next is Eddie. He takes out _Monster Land_ magazine. 

“One of Richie’s old horror movie magazines,” he says, and smiles sidelong at Richie. “You can’t have it back.”

Richie watches him place _Monster Land_ in the thing, and then grabs him and kisses him again really fast like he literally can’t help himself.

“Honestly I’m not sure I even need this, we could have doubled up,” Richie says, taking his token from his pocket without letting go of Eddie with his other hand. “Anyway, this is a symbol of the time a serial killer and a plastic statue yelled at me for being gay, and I left feeling like _I_ was the freak.”

In the circle of teary-eyed gentle laughter, Eddie thinks, yeah, he has always loved all of these people a lot, but right now he absolutely does love them all even more than ever. Mike lights the fire and they start the chants and it feels almost like they are, actually, ready.

Something else is _definitely_ happening when they pull the deadlights down. The sub-audible sound — despite still not actually being audible, and Eddie supposes thus technically not a _sound_ — seems really fucking loud to Eddie, only getting louder as they trap the lights and push the lid down together once again.

The urn starts to shake really differently than before as they all try to hold the lid on. “The fuck is this,” Richie says.

“Just hold on,” Mike says. The thing is bouncing around and pounding from the inside like — like somebody’s fighting somebody in it??? That physics-defying Looney Tunes image is the best match Eddie’s mind can come up with for what’s happening. One thing’s for sure, they are not going to be able to hold this down, and Eddie wonders for a split second if this is how he dies and he sure hopes they didn’t break the loop if it is.

_“GET BACK,”_ says a voice in Eddie’s head that is unbelievably loud and yet not painful at all, a voice that he instinctively knows is full of infinite love for them, and he does what it says and so does everybody else, and the urn thing fucking _EXPLODES._

“The fuck is that, what the fuck is that, Eddie what the FUCK is that,” Richie yells, grabbing his arm.

“HOW SHOULD I KNOW?” Eddie yells back, because it feels like it’s very loud in here, wherever or whatever ‘here’ is. Something is happening to space, or distance, or time, and they all do their best to hold on to each other while their eyes try to adjust.

Things get pretty weird after that.

“Guys,” Richie says, “everyone else sees a giant fucking turtle, right?”

“Yeah, that’s him,” Mike says.

“What?”

“That’s Maturin.”

“He’s a _turtle?_ ” Eddie says.

“Did I not tell you that?”

“No, Mike!”

Before them, or above them or something, is what’s clearly a gargantuan turtle, violently clashing with a giant clown-faced spider, which is in several shapes and is both the same size as and smaller than the turtle at the same time, because the turtle is the size of the cavern but also the size of a skyscraper but possibly also the size of the universe, _size of the entire universe man_ Eddie’s brain helpfully hums to try to take a little bit of the ontological edge off.

“Not to be a gay cliche, guys, but I don’t think we’re in Maine anymore.”

“I don’t think we’re in three-dimensional fucking _space,_ Richie,” Ben says.

“Is this what dropping acid is like?” Eddie says.

“Kinda,” Bev says.

“Have you never done acid?”

“Have you _met_ me, Bill? No I’ve never done _acid!_ “

“Am I the only one that cares about Ben saying the f-word?” Richie says.

“Yes,” everyone else says.

"'Kay."

The fight goes on for a while, insofar as they can retain a sense of time. 

If Eddie had to try to describe it, which he hopes he won’t ever have to, he would say it looked mostly like a giant monster fight but also kind of like a constellation fight too. Like this was maybe what it looked like when origin myths happened. 

Is this what ‘numinous’ means? Can you experience the numinous while you’re still slightly distracted by your childhood crush and how big his arms are, and your phone is making your ass numb in its giant waterproof case that you hope has actually managed to protect it from both the water and the incomprehensible eldritch forces, and you’re hungry and you actually don’t have to pee but you’re pretty sure you _should_ by now because how long has it actually been since going into the house?

Then the light is different. It folds into itself. And the spider-thing isn’t…there anymore. And the turtle is under them, and they hang on to its shell as space-time shifts itself again and it flies — nope, swims — 

yup, they are definitely _under_ water, hopefully this giant turtle guy remembers that they all need to breathe oxygen —

and they come up into the quarry, everything behaving like normal physical reality again except admittedly for the giant turtle, who lets them off on the shore and then floats in space above the water.

It’s now dark out, which is not very surprising. The turtle seems to be of the stars but not in them, or possibly the other way around.

_MY LITTLE CHAMPIONS,_ says the giant floating space turtle, his physical size still a little hard to pin down. _I’VE STRUGGLED TO RESTORE MYSELF FOR EONS UNTOLD._

“You were doing the time loops, right? I just wanna double check.”

_YES, RICHARD,_ the turtle says. _WHEN THE DEADLIGHTS CAPTURED YOUR HUMAN FORM THAT NIGHT, YOU BECAME CONNECTED TO MORE THAN JUST… MY BROTHER. YOU WERE ENTWINED WITH COSMIC FORCES YOUR LANGUAGE CANNOT COMPREHEND. AND YOU, EDWARD, SACRIFICED YOUR LIFE FOR HIM, AN ACT OF INCREDIBLE POWER. THE OLDEST AND MOST MERCILESS FORM OF MAGIC._

“I was definitely not _trying_ to die,” Eddie says.

_BUT YOU DID,_ says the turtle. _AND THROUGH YOUR BOND YOU BOTH CRIED OUT TO ME WITH A SINGLE VOICE. IN THAT MOMENT MY POWERS WERE ONE WITH YOUR PLEAS._ Eddie remembers: how much he didn’t want to go. How he pleaded — to no one, he thought — for another chance. 

_WHAT FOLLOWED MUST HAVE BEEN PAINFUL. I PROMISE IT WAS EVERYTHING THAT I HAD THE POWER TO GIVE YOU — MANIFEST ONLY BY THE POWER OF OF YOUR OWN SACRIFICE._

“It was pretty fuckin’ stressful,” Eddie says frankly.

“But also, you know, thank you,” Richie says. “For bringing him back.” His voice cracks a little.

“Uh,” Bill says. “Look, I don’t kn-know about anyone else but my brain can only sort of comprehend what was going on for the last…however long. Is It dead? Did you kill It?”

_YES._

“Okay,” Bill says. “…Is It going to come back?”

_NO._

“Okay.” 

_I TAKE NO PLEASURE IN WHAT HAD TO BE DONE. ONCE, LONG AGO… THERE WAS A BALANCE. BUT HE BETRAYED HIS PURPOSE. HE GREW CRUEL, AND IN TIME BECAME CRUELTY ITSELF._

The turtle turns to Mike. _YOU WERE RIGHT, MICHAEL._

“About…?”

_YOU SAID THAT YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS BELONG TO A LINEAGE OF BRAVE CHAMPIONS SPANNING THE MILLENNIA. THAT EVERY ONE WHO STOOD AGAINST HIM HELPED TO FREE ME. YOU SPOKE TRULY._

“That’s what I said, huh?”

“Yeah, you said a lot of really smart shit,” Eddie says.

_BEVERLY,_ the turtle says next. 

She looks up, tilting her head.

_LIKE MY BROTHER’S, MY POWERS HAVE SOME SWAY IN THE REALMS KNOWN TO YOU AS **TIME** AND **MEMORY.** THOUGH MY STRENGTH WILL REMAIN DIMINISHED FOR MANY EONS, I CAN GRANT YOU THE FORGETTING THAT YOU ONCE WISHED FOR._

“I wanted that?” Bev says.

_WHEN YOU FIRST LIVED THIS DAY, YES. IF YOU STILL WISH FOR YOUR MEMORIES OF DERRY TO LEAVE YOU, AS THEY DID ONCE BEFORE, YOU NEED ONLY SAY THE WORD AND I WILL TAKE THEM._

Bev shakes her head. “Forgetting wasn’t a gift for me,” Bev says. “It took me to bad places that I couldn’t understand. I know the truth now, and I want to keep it that way.”

Maturin turns to the group of them. _IF ANY OF YOU DESIRE IT, I OFFER THE SAME CHOICE TO YOU._

“The whole time when we’d forgotten,” Bill says, “I s-still knew the _fact_ that I had a brother. And I never thought about it. I knew he’d d-died when we were children. And I never felt anything about it. When we forgot, he was taken away from me a second time. I’m never letting that happen again.”

“Is there a way I could actually get _more_ memories?” Richie says, his hand around Eddie’s waist. “Specifically the loop right before this one? For personal reasons.”

_I’M SORRY, RICHARD, IT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY._

“Because once I went back, those days didn’t really happen anymore,” Eddie says. “Right? Or did all those things still…did they happen?”

_IT DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN BY ‘HAPPEN.’_

“Don’t know what I expected,” Eddie mutters. 

“It’s cool. I shoulda known the Wizard wasn’t going to give me a brain.”

“What does that make Eddie?” Bev says with a little smile, bumping her shoulder against his.

“Don’t think too hard about it. It’s not really gonna map, there’s s… There’s six of us,” Richie says, his voice going suddenly unsteady.

“Look,” Eddie says, taking a step forward, keeping Richie’s hand in his. “I know you keep telling us that your powers aren’t… I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I know how much you gave us. But — there are so many other people that It took who should be here.” He holds Richie’s hand tight to try not to cry. 

“Stan, and…” Eddie takes a breath and has to start over. “I just. Stan would ask, if he was here. For any of us. I remember him telling me when we were kids — okay, I’m not a very spiritual person and I’m probably not gonna get this right. But that it’s, like, a good thing to be ready to argue with God, if necessary.”

_I’M NOT GOD, EDWARD,_ says the turtle, gentle and sad.

“Stan. Adrian Mellon. That kid that got taken from the baseball game, she was like, five years old.” He knows the answer as he looks into the galaxy-eye but he keeps going anyway. “Betty. With her little shoe.” Richie squeezes his hand tight. “…Georgie.”

_I AM VERY SORRY, EDWARD._

Eddie’s not sure who starts full-on crying first, but it seems like they move together as one, all crying and holding each other, soaked to the skin and finally feeling the cold hit them, like when they all embraced Bill and cried after facing It in 1989, but now they are only six, the circle broken.

They can feel the turtle fading up into…the sky, Eddie guesses.

“Where’s he going?” Richie says, watching.

_I AM GOING TO HEAL FROM MY CAPTIVITY,_ Maturin says, the voice feeling more like an impression in their minds than a sound. _IT WILL TAKE A VERY LONG TIME._

“Like… where?” Richie says.

_YOU CALL IT THE CENTER OF THE MILKY WAY GALAXY,_ Maturin replies.

“Okay.”

Eddie still has kind of a lot of questions, but the turtle did say he wasn’t God. So he guesses he’s just going to have a lot of questions forever, like normal.

“We probably should’ve asked him to take us back to where the road is,” Ben says after a minute. “Now we have to go up the long way.”

Bev sighs. “Well, it’s not like my back ever doesn’t hurt anyway.” She turns to the rest of them. “Guys…” she gently says. “Can we go? As the one woman in this group, I need you to understand it is fucking _freezing.”_

“Yeah, let’s get inside,” Ben says. They all wipe at their eyes and make their slow and steady way up to the road. 

“I think,” Eddie says after a little bit of quiet walking, “I should check my phone.” Richie looks at him and he realizes Richie might think he’s about to open up whatever messages he probably has from Myra, so he clarifies. “Make sure everything’s been okay in town while we were dealing with the whole… eldritch abomination.”

“…What could we even do about it if everything hasn’t been okay,” Bill says, but they don’t have to dwell on that part, because the police blotter is quiet, the tweets around their location are quiet, the Canal Days festival has a cheerful closing-night message up and Eddie doesn’t _love_ seeing that many balloon emojis under any circumstances but it looks like everything in town is, indeed, pretty chill. 

“Okay,” says Bill, who turns out to also have a working phone. “Now that no one’s getting murdered. How b-bout we order dinner on the way, I could fucking eat a horse.”

“Yuhwant late-nite delivery, city boy?” Mike says. “I have some bad news.”

“It’s not actually that late.” Bill looks at his phone. “Like, Jade of the Orient’s open for a couple more hours. Do you think they’d deliver to the hotel, or are they gonna figure out it’s us?”

“You cannot be fucking serious,” Bev says.

Bill scrolls a little longer. “…How do we feel about Tony’s Kebab House?”

“I just now found out it exists, but I feel _fantastic_ about Tony’s Kebab House,” Richie says. “I hope Tony has an incredibly successful chain of kebab houses all over this godforsaken state, I hope his flagship kebab house is across the street from the governor’s mansion, and I would like to order two of everything.”

Eddie looks at the menu over Bill’s shoulder. “Yeah, I can make something out of sides.”

“Why does Tony’s Kebab House have mashed potatoes,” Ben says, looking over Bill’s other shoulder.

“God, Ben, you fucking coastal elitist,” Richie says.

“I live in western Nebraska,” Ben says.

“That sounds nice,” Bev says quietly. 

Eddie can’t actually see her at the moment because Ben is so freaking tall, and he tactfully doesn’t look over at Ben but from the corner of his eye he still sees Ben’s cheeks go pink like a thirteen-year-old boy in the grip of a life-threatening crush. He can relate.

When they finally get back, Eddie goes through the door of the Townhouse first, out of habit. He stops short halfway, the others piling up behind him in the bottleneck. 

“Bowers,” he says quietly, “is in the lobby.”

Bowers, facing away from them but easily recognizable nevertheless, is sitting on an ottoman by the fireplace. He’s playing with his knife, fresh blood visible on the blade. He seems not to register their presence. 

Eddie quietly takes his phone out and finds the Townhouse manager’s personal cell phone number. He tries again to remember anything about the conversation they had on Saturday night, the one time they met.

The phone rings. Eddie wonders how long Joe’s worked here. What he does in his free time. Whether he had kids. Has kids. The phone keeps ringing.

“This is Joe.”

“Oh — heyyy,” Eddie says, keeping his eyes on Bowers. “It’s Eddie Kaspbrak.”

“Hey,” Joe says. “You all need something up there? I’m over in the cottage, but I can swing by in a jiff.”

“No, no,” Eddie says, “we’re fine, it was, actually just a butt-dial, sorry about that. We’re all fine here, now. Stay _right_ where you are.”

“All right,” Joe says. “No wild parties, okay?”

“Ha ha,” Eddie says. “Yeah. G’night.” He hangs up. 

Bowers turns to face them, and they now see where the blood came from. His face is gouged with roughly parallel knife wounds, down his forehead into the center of each eyebrow, then down each cheek starting a hair’s-breadth below where they would have probably punctured his actual eyeballs. 

Bev quietly takes Eddie’s phone, stands a little way outside the door, and starts calling the cops.

“He said it was time,” Bowers says, looking at the group of them. He sounds confused and not quite awake. “He brought my friend back.”

“You never had any friends, dude,” Richie says matter-of-factly.

“Better than yours,” Bowers says to Richie. “They were _strong_. Like me. I had my friends. I had a purpose. _He_ said I had a purpose.”

“Didn’t Bowers kill most of his friends? In ’89?” Bill whispers to Mike. “Did I make that up?”

“And I had the moon. All these years.” Bowers points his knife upward like it’s just a laser pointer or something. “His big, white face.” Bowers waves the knife back at his own face. “It was your _time_ now. He _said_. But now they’re gone.” He points the business end of the knife toward Eddie, with more sense of menace. “It was supposed to be your time.” 

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He doesn’t move. “It is. It’s our time.”

“Where is he?” Bowers says. “He’s _gone._ Where _is he!?”_

“You know, I think he’s been inside of you all along,” Richie says.

Bowers squints at Richie, then looks down at himself. He lifts up the bottom hem of his bloodstained shirt and sets the very point of the switchblade knife curiously against his own gut. Thankfully, that’s when the first wave of cops show up.

At some point between the departure of the cops and the arrival of dinner, they do all manage to go upstairs and shower, a few at a time. Eddie stares at the bathtub in his room for a while, wondering if he should go ask someone else if he can use theirs. He’s sure someone would have offered if they’d heard about the Bowers stabbing incident this time, but he probably didn’t tell them, or if he did there’s been a lot going on since this morning.

In the end, he very quietly says _“Surprise, motherfucker”_ as he yanks the shower curtain open on the empty tub, and then he takes a shower, maybe a faster one than usual, and gets dressed in the same clothes he put on yesterday morning when he wanted to look nice for Richie, and he doesn’t spend much time looking in the mirror because it turns out the mirror makes him a little nervous too, and he walks quickly back downstairs.

When he comes back to the lobby, he sees that everyone’s upstairs except Mike, with Bill’s phone left on the table in case the delivery guy calls. Mike’s gotten a change of clothes, which Eddie guesses must have come from Ben’s suitcase. Mike’s head is pillowed on his arms and it looks like he’s just about ready to fall asleep on the table, and it’s adorable.

Bill’s phone buzzes just as the others are filing back down to the lobby. Eddie gets the door, taking a quick detour on the way when he notices some of Bowers’s blood clearly visible on the ottoman and shoves it under a table so the guy from Tony’s Kebab House won’t have to see it.

Together they clear off the table and bring in the delivery food, which looks to be pretty much the whole restaurant. “Lemme take care of the tip,” Ben says, pulling out his wallet, as Eddie grabs the last bag.

“I got it already, it’s on my card,” Bill says. Ben sticks an extra twenty in the delivery guy’s hand anyway.

“Fuck, this smells good,” Richie says. “Hey Bill, how much did it come out to?“

“Oh, c’mon,” Bill says, waving him away. “Who gives a shit.”

“Just trying to have good manners for once in my life.”

“Not taking a dime from any of you f-fuckers,” Bill says. He gestures with a plastic fork to the table full of food as he grabs the nearest box. “Bold of you to assume I won’t be eating _all_ of this. You want any for yourselves, act now.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice.” Richie starts opening cartons and bowls haphazardly, grabbing some and putting others back. Eddie pulls up a chair and meets Bev’s eye in a silent assent of _let’s just let all these idiots scramble over it and then get our food like adults._

When some space opens up for Eddie to start looking for his sides of beet salad and cauliflower and a double helping of plain rice, though, he realizes they’re already stacked up in front of him. “…Thanks,” he says to Richie, who’s just taken a huge bite of shawarma, but he smiles back shyly with his eyes and gives Eddie a thumbs-up.

The conversation slows for a while, because they’re all too busy snarfing up food like so many 14-year-olds. Eddie soon finds himself blinking down at a row of empty food cartons with barely a memory of eating it all, and makes a mental note to _absolutely_ go see a specialist as soon as humanly possible to find out what the fuck — if anything, he adds grimly — he is actually allergic to. Richie shoves the rest of his french fries at him, and after a cautious nibble, Eddie puts those away as well.

As the rest of the food disappears, Eddie starts absent-mindedly stacking empty boxes together and sticking all the plastic bags inside one bag. Mike, his head sleepily resting on his arms again, watches him.

“Eds, if you’re sorting things for Derry’s state-of-the-art recycling program—“

“Just let me pretend, Mikey. This is soothing to me.” Mike chuckles and nods.

“Eddie, honey,” Bev says, “with this whole time thing…how long is it since you’ve actually slept?”

“That depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” Eddie says.

“Richie, would you get your man out of here already,” Bev says, pointing up the stairs with a shooing motion.

“Yeah, honestly,” Bill says. “What the f-fuck are you still doing here, I didn’t think you would even come back downstairs for dinner.”

“Oh, because gay people are insatiable sex fiends,” Richie says, leaning back with his arms crossed and trying unsuccessfully to keep a straight face. “I see how it is.”

“Yes, that’s exactly it,” Bill says.

“I mean, last time Bill seriously texted us saying ‘congrats on the sex,’” Eddie says, having given up on any filters by now, which sets the whole table off the deep end again.

_“Congrats?”_ Bev says to Bill, or really just mouths at him in the din of laughter.

“What?” Bill says. “Do you not watch _Brooklyn Nine-Nine_?” Bev shakes her head, still giggling, and Bill says, “Wait, wait, you don’t? We need to unpack this.”

“That’s not where that’s from,” Ben says.

“I don’t watch, like, anything,” Bev says pensively. “I’m gonna watch so much fucking TV.”

“I can tell you a lot of things _not_ to watch,” Richie says.

“It’s not from _Brooklyn Nine-Nine_?” Bill says to Ben, whose attention is mostly back on Bev already.

“No, it’s from Lonely Planet. —Fuckin’… no… the other thing,” Ben says.

“Lonely Island,” Mike says without lifting his head up.

Eddie taps Richie on the shoulder as he starts opening his mouth. Richie meets his eye and closes his mouth, and lets the others continue, laughing and overlapping each other. Eddie quietly scoots his chair out, and there is literally no way for them to unobtrusively leave to go upstairs but everyone’s nice enough to pretend there is.

As soon as they’re up on the walkway out of the sightline of the lobby, Eddie pulls Richie in and starts kissing him again, leaning back so Richie has him caged in (god he’s so _tall_ god his _arms_ ), one hand on the wall and the other sliding under his t-shirt. “Fuck, I love your hands,” Eddie says quietly into Richie’s ear, “okay holy shit Richie we are in the—“

“We are in the _hallway,”_ Richie murmurs back, “yeah, you’re right, okay, your place or mine?”

“Mine.”

“Cool, I like that, you sound very sure about that.”

“Mine’s on the end, so we have at least one room of sound buffer.”

“Oh, ‘cause you snore, huh?” Richie says, hooking his fingers in Eddie’s front pocket.

“Yeah, that’s it exactly.” Eddie starts to tug them both toward his door.

“Wait, lemme just go find my toiletries kit,” Richie says, taking a step back.

“Ha.”

“No seriously, unless you keep sex stuff in _your_ overnight bag, which, I would have some follow-up questions,”

“Oh,” Eddie says, “right, I — yeah. …Don’t take too long,” and he bumps into his own door before fumbling it open. He leaves it a little bit ajar for Richie, does a quick check of the bathroom and closet because it’s a lot easier to assuage his paranoia than try to ignore it, and sits on the edge of the bedspread. Just sitting there feels goofy, and he lets himself flop back, looking up at the ceiling. He touches his fingers to the dip in his collarbone, where Richie kissed him before.

Richie doesn’t come back for a minute — probably just had to go to the bathroom or something, Eddie thinks. But the minutes go on, and Eddie’s about ready to start getting paranoid again by the time Richie comes in, knocking on the open door first.

“Hey,” Eddie says, getting up. Richie gives him a half-smile, closing the door behind him.

“Hey.” Richie sticks his hands in his pockets, a little worry line across his forehead that Eddie wants to kiss away.

“Everything okay?”

“Uh. Yeah, I just… the adrenaline’s settled down a little. I was just thinking.”

“Okay?” Eddie says. What is this?

“I just want to know what’s gonna happen next,” Richie says.

“Like tomorrow?” Eddie says, uncertain. “I don’t…”

“No, not like, you-know-the-future what happens next,” Richie says. “What…happens, like.”

“Oh, jesus,” Eddie says as it clicks, “I’m not going back to my _wife,_ if that’s what you’re asking? You can’t possibly think I was gonna go back to my wife.”

The shaky breath that Richie lets out is enough to answer his question. “I mean, I guess not but, you know, I’m an adult and I know people do things that are bad ideas and make no sense. Even the smartest, coolest people.”

“Are you talking about me? Because I’ve never once, in my entire life, been cool.”

Richie touches his face, leans in and stage-whispers, “I always thought you were cool,” like a love confession, still kind of goofing off.

“I’m. Not going to.” (He doesn’t even want to say ‘go back to my wife’ anymore.) “I’m not. I want to be with you, Richie. I only married her because some fucked up alien space magic made me forget who I really am.”

Eddie thinks about how many people in the world have said ‘I’m not going back to my wife’ and then gone back to their wives, and a lot of them may well have been just as sure as he is right now that this was Different. 

“Hey, listen,” he says, running his hand lightly down Richie’s wrist. “If you want to wait? On all of this? Until I’ve like _left_ her left her, and papers have been served and you have the proof in front of you. I would understand that.”

“Eddie,” Richie says, shaking his head. “No, dude. I know you. That’s — that’s my proof. Don’t be ridiculous.” Eddie’s heart flutters and he has to kiss him again, has to get on his tiptoes and run his fingers through Richie’s hair and taste his stupid gorgeous mouth. 

When he comes up for air Richie says, “Plus, I’ve never done it with a married guy before, stoked to check that one off on the Purity Test.”

“Jesus christ,” Eddie rolls his eyes, “ _Purity Test,_ we’re so fucking old.”

“I don’t feel old,” Richie says, pulling him close again. “Do you?”

“Mm-mm,” Eddie says, tilting his head so Richie can kiss down his neck, sucking love-bites along the tender skin. He sighs happily as Richie slides a hand down his ass and under his thigh, hitching his leg up, and Eddie gets a good grip on Richie’s shoulders and wraps both legs around his waist, and Richie carries him the short but thrilling distance to the bed.

“Okay,” he says a little breathlessly, “that’s hot as hell, I’m gonna want you to do that all the time now.”

“I’ll start working out,” Richie says, taking off his button-down.

“Mm. What’ve you _been_ doing,” Eddie says, because seriously. 

He runs his fingers along Richie’s gorgeous arms, and Richie blushes, distracted from getting undressed, one sleeve still on. “Oh,” Richie says, “that’s just from jerkin’ it.”

“Uh-huh.” He kisses Richie on the bicep, tugging his shirt the rest of the way off and tossing it to the floor.

“Hey, that’s a Naked & Famous, y’know.”

“ _You’re_ a naked and famous,” Eddie says, hooking his fingers inside the hem of Richie’s jeans, getting him to laugh and moan at the same time.

“Working on it.”

It feels like Eddie barely got to touch last time, it was still the most romantic sex of his life so far but they didn’t actually manage to get all their clothes off or anything, and he’s hungry for contact. He runs one hand up Richie’s broad bare chest and keeps fumbling at Richie’s buttons with the other, until Richie nudges his hand away to undo his fly himself. Eddie kisses his chest, grazes his teeth along the skin, tangles his fingers in Richie’s hair and gives it an experimental little tug, and Richie goes “oh my fuck, do that again” so he does, a little harder, and Richie sighs, “oh, _Eddie,”_ kissing him again, pulling him back so that Eddie ends up laying on top of him.

Eddie raises himself up on one arm and looks down at Richie, who looks up at him, dazzled, and licks his lips, and suddenly it makes Eddie think of how he looked when Eddie ran to him after the deadlights that first night — he threw the post and It went down and he ran to help Richie, he was leaning over Richie, and Richie looked up at him and licked his lips and reached up, god, Richie wanted to kiss him then.

“Hey, you okay?” Richie reaches up to touch his face, and Eddie turns towards it, kissing the palm of his hand. 

“Yeah, I’m good,” Eddie says. He takes Richie’s hand, leans back down, and kisses him for a long time. “Can I fuck you?”

“God, yeah,” Richie breathes. “Is that a trick question or something? Yeah.”

“I didn’t,” Eddie loses his train of thought for a second as Richie wraps his legs around him, “I uh didn’t know what your, like, preference was, it’s not like we had that kind of time yesterday.”

“Well, good,“ Richie says softly. “I wouldn’t want to forget any of this.”

Richie kind of has to walk him through it, because he’s never done this with a guy (“be gentle with me,” Eddie says, and they both giggle) but it’s not embarrassing, it’s hot, it’s so intimate, and Richie looks incredible, honestly, the way his face looks unguarded and losing himself in sensation is just irresistible and Eddie has to keep going back up to kiss him over and over.

When Eddie starts fucking him Richie moans so loud he gives _himself_ the giggles. Eddie tugs at Richie’s hair again with his not-covered-in-lube hand so he can hear him gasp and groan through his laughter again, Richie cries out in pleasure, he hooks his legs around Eddie and grabs at his ass and goes “fuck, Eddie, you fucking— stud,” still kind of laughing at himself. 

Richie keeps talking the whole time, because of course he does, though he goes from semi-complete sentences to _yeah oh god_ and _love you_ just _please, please_ which, Eddie’s definitely already giving him everything he’s got, maybe he just likes saying it.

“Yeah, I got you,” Eddie kisses his neck, “I love you, I got you.” Richie’s hands scramble at his back and he sighs Eddie’s name again and again, and Eddie feels him coming and tumbles right over the edge after him.

Even though Eddie’s been awake, depending on how you define it, for about a week and a half, he watches Richie sleep for a while without starting to nod off himself. He’s neither tired nor wired, just…watchful. He doesn’t check the time — he turned his phone off hours ago. 

At some point Richie half-wakes and shuffles around, and after that Eddie falls asleep for a while. They both half-doze off and on through the night, never quite at the same time. 

When the night is over and the sun’s fully risen on the new day, Eddie settles on Richie’s sleeping chest and feels himself finally, fully drifting into sleep with him. Somewhere outside the window, two birds are singing. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. <3
> 
> Say hi on [tumblr](https://sidleyparkhermit.tumblr.com/post/612604060064956416/fic-derry-days-it-movies-richieeddie) or [livejournal](https://sidleypkhermit.livejournal.com/52225.html).
> 
> Edit: OMG 8tracks is BACK and I can share the real mixtape for this fic <https://8tracks.com/sidleyparkhermit/derry-day>
> 
> Thank you so much to the lovely people on the Reddie discord for all the support and encouragement. (And thank you Epigone for being there analog-style too. How *does* anyone get through life without sweet goddamn Richie Tozier, indeed.)


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